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Event Summary
"REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Mar. 6, 2000 - Oracle announced the immediate
availability of Oracle Warehouse Builder, an extensible and easy-to-use
data warehouse design and deployment framework. As part of Oracle's Intelligent
WebHouse Initiative, Oracle Warehouse Builder automates much of the work
that goes into creating a powerful, single data store for e-business analysis,
specifically with its ability to integrate historical data with the massive,
daily influxes of online data from web sites. The product, already in
production at nearly 20 beta sites worldwide, is available for purchase
tomorrow."
The
Oracle Warehouse Builder framework eliminates the previous time-consuming
and error-prone methods for deploying data warehouses, data marts, and
e-business applications, even when integrating ERP data from multiple
vendors such as Oracle and SAP. These previous methods included hand coding
the software and stitching together point solutions. Oracle Warehouse
Builder enables customers to deploy even terabyte-sized data warehouses
quickly, an essential benefit in today's cutthroat business environment.
"With
Oracle Warehouse Builder, Honeywell is building a data warehouse infrastructure
that top management will use daily to spot inefficiencies that affect
the bottom line. For example, we can find out if an order is being held
up on the manufacturing floor or in shipping, and then take the needed
steps to get the order out and revenue booked," said Jason Haugland, consultant
for Honeywell. "Because of the great data integration features in Oracle
Warehouse Builder, we can easily pull flat-file data from our legacy system
into our warehouse. The product also interfaces extremely well with Oracle8i,
allowing us to create specific features such as materialized views and
dimension capabilities, which we use to build high-level aggregate summaries
directly into the database."
"Oracle Warehouse Builder integrates the areas that were previously addressed
by separate tools into one common environment. Functions include modeling
and design, data extraction, movement and loading, aggregation, metadata
management and integration of analysis tools are all part of Oracle Warehouse
Builder's easy-to-use and easy-to-implement framework."
Market
Impact
Oracle has publicly stated that being late to market was caused by "lengthy
beta testing". In reality, Oracle has had problems meeting release dates,
and difficulty integrating the various technologies involved. They have
also stated that data quality management software provided by the acquisition
of Carleton Software will not be integrated for "a few months." The tool
does currently have modeling software, tools for generating PL-SQL (Oracle's
proprietary stored procedure language), a workflow manager, and gateway
software for data access.
Whether
this product is too late to market to meet customers' needs remains to
be seen. Doubtless, Oracle will throw their considerable marketing muscle
into the fray to try to offset the delay.
User
Recommendations
Customers evaluating complete data warehouse solutions should consider
Oracle's Warehouse Builder on a long list of candidates, along with offerings
from Informatica, Ardent Software (now part of Informix), and Computer
Associates, among others. Oracle has stated that the key attraction is
that "the product offers warehouse design, warehouse administration, and
metadata management capabilities all in one suite."
Given
that the product has just been released into general availability, the
full functionality of the product is unknown. Oracle can throw a wide
array of resources at the product to ensure its success, so it should
not be ignored.
Customers
should also evaluate "best-of-breed" solutions which combine warehouse
design tools such as CA/Erwin, administration tools such as Embarcadero's
DBArtisan, and metadata management facilities such as CA/Platinum Open
Enterprise Edition Repository. Complete solutions from a single vendor
may not comprise the best answer to a customer's problem.