Purpose

There are numerous data warehousing books out there, so why is this one different? Simply put: its DBA focus on implementation details. In fact, the mission statement for this book is:

To serve as the DBA's definitive and detailed reference regarding the successful design, construction, tuning, and maintenance of star schema data warehouses in Oracle 8i and 9i.

So how is this different from what's already out there? In general, I've found that most data warehousing books fall into one of three categories:

• Conceptual? Primarily educational about theories and practices, with very high-level information

• Overview? Catalogs of hardware, software, and database options, with few specific recommendations

• Cookbook? Detailed, DBA-oriented advice for all the data warehouse development lifecycle stages

Respectively, "best-of-breed" examples for these three categories are:

• Data Warehouse Tool Kit: Practical Techniques for Building Dimensional Data Warehouses by Ralph Kimball

• Oracle8 Data Warehousing by Gary Dodge and Tim Gorman

• This book, primarily since no other book exists with this kind of detailed DBA advice

I mean no disrespect to these other categories or their books. I highly recommend Kimball's book to anyone new to data warehousing. And until such time as this books debuts, I also highly recommend Dodge's book for DBAs.