Oracle rebuilds Warehouse: "Unsurprisingly, Oracle has announced a whole bunch of new products at Oracle OpenWorld this week. Some of these, like the new version of 11i, will get lots of media attention. One that will not is the new release of Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB), code-named Paris. However, in its own right it is pretty significant and it merits some serious consideration.

Perhaps the first and most obvious new feature that will be available in the Paris release (which is scheduled to be available by the end of the year) is that you will be able to send data to third party databases as targets. You will, however, have to use Oracle Transparent Gateways to do this, which presumably means that you have to go via an Oracle database. However, as OWB uses the database as its engine this shouldn't be a hardship.

The second major new facility is data profiling. Just how clever this is I do not yet know (I am arranging a detailed briefing) but my guess would be that it is on a par with, or better than, the other ETL vendors that have introduced comparable capabilities over the last year, but not as advanced as the specialised product's from companies like Trillium Software.

There is some other nice stuff in OWB. For example, it understands OLAP and has support for such things as slowly changing dimensions; the cleansing and matching capabilities provided can be integrated with data mining algorithms for enrichment purposes; there is a mapping debugger for transformations; there are extensive new metadata features and expert capabilities; and so on and so forth."