Chapter 9. Extra Features

Congratulations on having made it this far and completing the data warehouse implementation! We've now covered all the Warehouse Builder basics that we need to begin building our data warehouses for our organizations. This chapter will deal with some extra topics that can help us get the most out of what we've learned so far and improve our use of the Warehouse Builder. The focus will be on those features that we will find useful as we create more complex data warehouses, and are faced with making changes and updates.

Metadata change management is an important practice we'll want to employ as we make more and more edits and changes to our data warehouse over time, and the Warehouse Builder includes a number of features that can help us with this. We'll look at the Recycle Bin for saving deleted objects, copying and pasting objects to make copies for backup or as the basis for new objects, taking snapshots of objects to save the state at a point in time, and the...

Additional editing features

We stepped through the process of building our data warehouse from start to finish in this book, but did not address having to go back and make changes to objects or mappings we've already completed. This presents some unique challenges as we saw when we alluded briefly to an error that might occur if changes are made to a dimension, but not the underlying table. Let's talk about the features the Warehouse Builder has that will help us with keeping a track of the various versions of our objects as we make changes.

Metadata change management

Metadata change management includes keeping a track of different versions of an object or mapping as we make changes to it, and comparing objects to see what has changed. It is always a good idea to save a working copy of objects and mappings when they are complete and function correctly. That way, if we need to make modifications later and something goes wrong, or we just want to reproduce a system from an earlier point in...

Warehouse Builder online resources

Oracle provides a number of resources to assist us with using the Warehouse Builder and with Data Warehousing in general. We saw one such resource earlier in this chapter when we talked about binding a table to a dimension. That download is just one of many that are available from that OWB Utility Exchange tips and tricks web site, which is available directly at the link provided previously or as a link off the much larger web page Oracle has that is devoted entirely to Oracle Warehouse Builder at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/warehouse/index.html.

The link to the download is in a box to the right labeled Other Downloads along with some links to software, patches, and sample code.

The OWB developers maintain a blog that they frequently update with various news and notes about OWB—its future or features of interest. The blog is available via a link from the above OWB page or directly at http://blogs.oracle.com/warehousebuilder/.

This is an excellent...

Summary

In this chapter we've finished discussing some additional features of the tool. These are not necessarily essential to the initial development of a data warehouse, but are nevertheless valuable features to have available for further development and maintenance. These include features such as metadata change management, which become critical as more and more changes are required to a data warehouse. The Recycle Bin, the Cut, Copy, and Paste features, Snapshots, and the Metadata Loader all assist greatly in our efforts to control the changes we have to make and to keep a track of prior revisions.

Another valuable feature is the ability to keep the objects synchronized with the operators in the mappings that refer to those objects. Also, we can automatically update objects that are bound together, such as dimensions and the tables used to implement them. These features will assist greatly in the task of making changes to our data warehouse, which will inevitably need to be done in any...