Paris for the Designer

Today I looked into a pre release of Oracles Warehouse Builder 10gR2 (Paris). This comprehensive tool can be used to create complex data warehoused holding data from many different data sources like tables (in different databases), files etc.

I was really pleased by the very good reverse engineering capabilities of the tool. It’s very easy to load a schema into the Design Center of OWB. Adding new tables is also very straightforward. This functionality will compete directly with Oracles own Designer tool. To me it looks like OWB is better equiped to model complex datamodels than Designer.

The following picture shows the data object editor. Here you can define tables, keys, constraints etc.

The main goal of OWB is of course to create a data warehouse. For this you should be able to extract transform and load data (ETL) from different data sources into your warehouse. This can all be done with a graphical tool. All the code needed for deployment will be generated automatically. The following example shows a simple mapping from data from a source table to a destination table. All copying code is generated by OWB.

The tool is very stable allthough Paris is a pre-release. This version will only run on Windows (including the repository database), but I am sure Oracle will fix that in their final release.