Oracle 9iR2 Data Warehousing | Oracle9iR2 Data Warehousing

Lilian Hobbs

Susan Hillson

Shilpa Lawande

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 Hobbs, Lilian, 1959-   Oracle 9iR2 data warehousing / Lilian Hobbs, Susan Hillson, Shilpa Lawande. p. cm.

ISBN 1-55558-287-7

1. Oracle (Computer file) 2. Data warehousing I. Hillson, Susan, II. Lawande, Shilpa. III. Title.

QA76.9.D37 H62 2003

658.4'038'0285574--dc21 2002041271

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For Simon, sadly missed

-Lilian

For Stacey and Emily, my golden girls

-Susan

To my parents and in-laws

-Shilpa

Acknowledgments

When writing a book, there are many people who are involved at various stages of the production cycle. The extremely important but often silent contributors are those people who give up their valuable spare time to review the book. We are extremely grateful to the following people, who gave up their valuable time to review this book.

Srinivas Bala is Senior Manager, Quality Assurance, at Narad Networks. Srinivas has several years of experience with the design of Oracle databases and applications in the telecommunications industry.
Jay Davison, Director of Software Development, Database Utilities, Oracle Corporation.
Jean-Pierre Dijcks, Product Manager for Oracle Warehouse Builder, Oracle Corporation.
Mike Durran, Discoverer Product Manager, Oracle Corporation.
Bud Endress is Director of Product Management for Oracle OLAP Products and has contributed screenshots and examples for the OLAP chapter.
Abhinav Gupta is Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Server Technologies division at Oracle.
Ramkumar Krishnan is Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Oracle Data Mining Group at Oracle.
James Lear, a member of the Discoverer development team at Oracle.
David Martland is a Technical Architect with the Britannia Building Society in the United Kingdom, who has many years experience using the Oracle database.
Judy Muller, Assistant Director, Business Services-University of New Hampshire.
Jack Raitto, Consulting Engineer and Project Leader for Summary Management at Oracle.
Pete Smith, is an independent Oracle data warehousing consultant. Based in the United Kingdom, he has many years experience, gained from working on various Oracle database projects.
Jim Steiner, Senior Director of Product Management, Oracle Corporation.

The previous edition of this book was also reviewed by Jay Feenan, Lory Molesky, Simon Oxbury, Michael Schmitz, Dennis Murray, and Mike Rubino.

We also need to say a big thank you to:

Steve Hagan, Vice President of the New England Development Center, for his encouragement and support throughout the writing of this book.
Max Hillson, whose e-commerce site, coolstuffcheap.com, served as the inspiration for many of the shopping examples.
Chuck Rozwat, Executive Vice President of Oracle Server Technologies, for his support while writing this book.

Finally, this book is dedicated to all the software developers at Oracle around the world, who write the software that made this book possible.

Our thanks also go to Theron Shreve and Pam Chester at Reed Elsevier and Alan Rose and his team for actually producing this book.