Site Overview

This blog is about building and maintaining Data Warehouses. Ask anyone in the industry about this and they will tell you that this technology is expensive - and they would be right. However, we can cut considerable corners if all we want is a development and self-training system. The hardware is relatively cheap (a mid- and low-spec PC and a few bits of network equipment), and the software is free!

Oracle software has both back- and front-end components. Most commercial implemenations of these system have the back-end on *NIX (usually a UNIX flavour but Linux implementations are becoming more common) and the front-end on Windoze. The initial build project of this blog will take the same approach.

Like all projects, this one breaks down into a number of tasks. The big picture is:

- Install the hardware
- Install Linux
- Install the Oracle Database
- Install Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) and back-end components
- Install Oracle et al front-end tools
- Design and build the Data Warehouse infrastructure
- Create Data Warehouse components
- Ongoing Data Warehouse maintenance

All except the last consist of discreet projects in this blog, most of which can be implemented independently of all the others.