It was almost five years ago when I wrote the foreword to the first edition of this book and over that time we have seen many changes. The challenge now facing most organizations after the dot-com boom and economic slowdown is how to deliver more, using fewer resources, without increasing costs or affecting the bottom line.

Information today is a critical business asset, and the demands placed upon it are rapidly changing. Historically, information was only kept for short periods of time, but once the business benefits of retaining all this information were realized, the Data Warehouse was born. Now they play a very important part in the daily running of the business and assist during tactical decision-making.

The user community who now regularly access the Data Warehouse are demanding ever more complex analysis and reporting. Portals have revolutionized access to the Data Warehouse because they provide easy access, whilst allowing each user to create their own customised view and set of reports.

New regulations and guidelines are now placing even more demands on organizations as they try to understand how they can cost-effectively store data for extremely long periods of time, whilst adhering to the rules as to which data must be held and how changes, if allowed, may be applied to the data. Today, Oracle Data Warehouses frequently contain many terabytes of data, but the arrival of the petabyte warehouse is not far away.

With demands upon data constantly changing. Organizations need to be able to easily change their configurations to support the extra demands placed on the system. Oracle Database 10g introduced grid computing, where pools of computing resources can be shared.

In the future, the data centre will be part of the grid, but it will only take from the grid the resources it needs to satisfy current demand, leaving those resources available for other systems to use who may need extra processing to satisfy their increase in demand.

Whether you are designing a large or small data warehouse, or looking for tips on how to improve performance using Oracle Database 10g, this book will provide you with advice and examples you can follow. It also includes thorough coverage of the data warehouse features in Oracle Database 10g, and the tools in Oracle Application Server 10g.

Chuck Rozwat

Executive Vice President

Server Technologies

Oracle Corporation