Oracle Essentials, 3rd Edition

Chapter 9. Oracle and Data Warehousing

Although a database is general-purpose software, it provides a solution for a variety of technical requirements, including:

Recording and storing data

Reliably storing data and protecting each user’s data from the effects of other users’ changes

Reading data for online viewing and reports

Providing a consistent view of the data

Analyzing data to detect business trends

Enables summarizing data and relating many different summaries to each other

The last two solutions are often deployed as a data warehouse, part of an infrastructure that provides business intelligence for corporate performance management.

Data warehousing and business intelligence implementations are a popular and powerful trend in information technology. There is a very simple motivation behind this trend: businesses gain the ability to use their data in making strategic and tactical decisions. Business intelligence can reveal hidden value embedded in an organization’s data stores.

Recognizing the trend, Oracle began adding data warehousing features to Oracle7 in the early 1990s. Additional features for warehousing and business intelligence appeared in subsequent releases, particularly to enable better performance, functionality, scalability, and management. Oracle also developed tools for building and using a business intelligence infrastructure, including data movement and business analyses tools.

A business intelligence infrastructure can enable business analysts to answer the following: ...