13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty good if you can get past the attitude, 4 Oct 2003
By Phillip D. Whittenberg "David Whittenberg" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas (Prentice Hall PTR Oracle Series) (Paperback)
The book offers a number of detailed tuning tips and insights from Mr. Scalzo's real world experience. That being said, the tone of the writing is really annoying. Mr. Scalzo's condescending style is unnecessary and takes away from what could be a very good book. At points, I actually broke out in laughter at his arrogance. However, if you can get past the author's attitude the content of the book seems to be quite helpful.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Veritable Gold Mine of Practical Hints and Tips!, 18 Feb 2004
By rdiehl - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas (Prentice Hall PTR Oracle Series) (Paperback)
As an Oracle DBA transitioning from the OLTP world to the warehousing arena, I found this book enormously helpful. In a mere 200 pages, Mr. Scalzo has elaborated on an extensive range of data warehousing topics, including: star-schemas, dimension hierarchies, SQL-tuning, partitioning and parallel loading to name a few. His style is informative and direct; his examples are meaningful and clear!
This is a must-have book for all DBA's serious about designing and managing large-scale, lightning-fast data warehousing systems.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Recipe for Success, 21 Aug 2004
By Jim Stagnitto - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas (Prentice Hall PTR Oracle Series) (Paperback)
Allow me to bestow some well-deserved praise upon Bert Scalzo's terrific "Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas". A true gem - I won't go on another Oracle project without it.
What Bert provides here is nothing short of a clear and crisp recipe for success for implementing Oracle-based data warehouses. It fills in a much-needed area of dimensional data warehousing best practices, by describing precisely how to coax the best achieveable Oracle performance from dimensional data models.
I can't tell you how many projects I've been on where I've had to compromise physical data models in order to address perceived "shortcomings" in Oracle's ability to efficiently service dimensional queries. Using Bert's book on my most recent project, we followed his "recipe", and were able to consistently achieve the ideal query optimization plans and aggregate navigation behaviors - simply - without any of the usual hassles that I have (unfairly) come to associate with large scale Oracle data warehousing.
To data warehousing newbies I humbly suggest: pick up any one of Ralph Kimball's terrific texts on data warehouse design, and then if you are rendering it in Oracle, buy this book and follow its advice. The resultant system will be simple, powerful, and fast.
Bravo Bert - a great contribution to the field.
Jim Stagnitto
Llumino, Inc (www.llumino.com)