Audience

This book is intended for physical DBAs?period, end of story. This book assumes an extensive and detailed working knowledge of Oracle technologies. Moreover, it presumes a keen awareness of hardware and software options?often a skill possessed only by DBAs who also serve as at least the backup operating system (OS) administrator as well. That said, there are chapters that will be both applicable and beneficial to other members of the data warehousing team.

The sections on data modeling define how a DBA should interpret and extrapolate an entity relationship diagram (ERD) into a physical database design. So, this chapter would assist data modelers and application architects to understand how a DBA uses their input to create the underlying database structure.

Likewise, the sections on staging, promoting, and aggregating data define how a DBA should manage objects and processes to most expeditiously load massive amounts of data. So, this chapter would be both educational and inspirational to extract, transform, and load (ETL) programmers tasked with loading a data warehouse.

And finally, the chapter on querying the data defines the indices, statistics, and plans necessary to deliver the best possible ad-hoc query runtimes. So, this chapter would assist business intelligence front-end designers, who can appreciate how the database handles their complex, ad-hoc queries.