Oracle DBAs finally have a definitive guide to every aspect of designing, constructing, tuning, and maintaining star schema data warehouses with Oracle 8i and 9i. Bert Scalzo, one of the world's leading Oracle data warehousing experts, offers practical, hard-won lessons and breakthrough techniques for maximizing performance, flexibility, and manageability in any production environment. Coverage includes: Data warehousing fundamentals for DBAs - including what a data warehouse isn't Planning software architecture: business intelligence, user interfaces, Oracle versions, OS platforms, and more Planning hardware architecture: CPUs, memory, disk space, and configuration Radically different star schema design for radically improved performance Tuning ad-hoc queries for lightning speed Industrial-strength data loading techniques Aggregate tables: maximizing performance benefits, minimizing complexity tradeoffs Improving manageability: The right ways to partition Data warehouse administration: Backup/recovery, space and extent management, updates, patches, and more