1 Overview

Oracle Warehouse Builder provides enterprise solutions for end-to-end data management. This chapter introduces you to the range of functionality provided by Warehouse Builder.

This chapter includes the following topics:

About Oracle Warehouse Builder
Data Consolidation and Integration

About Oracle Warehouse Builder

Oracle Warehouse Builder is a single, comprehensive tool for all aspects of data management. Warehouse Builder leverages the Oracle Database to transform data into high-quality information. It provides data quality, data auditing, fully integrated relational and dimensional modeling, and full life cycle management of data and metadata. Warehouse Builder enables you to create data warehouses, migrate data from legacy systems, consolidate data from disparate data sources, clean and transform data to provide quality information, and manage corporate metadata.

Data Consolidation and Integration

Many global corporations have data dispersed on different platforms using a wide variety of data reporting and analysis tools. Customer and supplier data may be stored in applications, databases, spreadsheets, flat files, and legacy systems. This diversity may be caused by organizational units working independently over the course of time, or it may be the result of business mergers. Whatever the cause for diversity, this diversity typically results in poor quality data that provides an incomplete and inconsistent view of the business.

Transforming poor quality data into high quality information requires:

Access to a wide variety of data sources

Warehouse Builder leverages the Oracle Database to establish transparent connections to numerous third-party databases, applications, files, and data stores as listed in "Supported Sources and Targets".
Ability to profile, transform and cleanse data

Warehouse Builder provides an extensive library of data transformations for data types such as text, numerical, date, and others. Use these transformations to reconcile the data from many different sources as described in "Using Oracle Warehouse Builder Transformations".

Before loading data into a new data store, you can optionally profile the data to evaluate its quality and appropriateness. Subsequently, you can match and merge records using rules that you devise. You can validate name and address data against postal databases. This process of changing poor quality data into high quality information is introduced in "About the Data Quality Management Process".
Ability to implement designs for diverse applications

Using Warehouse Builder, you can design and implement any data store required by your applications, whether relational or dimensional.
Audit trails

After consolidating data from a variety of sources into a single data store, you likely face the challenge of proving the validity of the output information. For instance, can you track and proof how a particular number was derived? This is a question often posed by decision makers within your organization and by government regulators.

Depending on how you utilize Warehouse Builder, you may require licenses for additional database options and, or technologies such as Oracle Partitioning, Oracle OLAP and the Oracle Transparent Gateways.