Data Warehousing - Technical Perspective

[bcrosier]

I am in search of a technical perspective regarding the following questions. I have heard the sales side of things, but I want a deeper understanding of the technical benefits.

Here are my questions:

1. What are the benefits of using an Oracle 10g warehouse over a SAS 9 warehouse?

2. What are the benefits to using Oracle ETL tools over SAS ETL tools?

3. Is there any benefit to using an Oracle warehouse if the ETL, analytic, portal, and reporting solutions are all SAS?

4. What is the best operating system to run Oracle 10g on for a data warehouse?

5. What is the best operating system to run SAS 9 on for a data warehouse?

Thanks for any assistance you can provide!

 

[johnherman]

Here's my advice on how to get started with these very important questions.

1, 2, and 3 Ask the Oracle vendor why to choose Oracle of SAP. Ask the SAP vendor why to choose SAP over Oracle. Let each vendor respond to what the other company says are its strengths and weaknesses. Ask each vendor if they have a customer who chose Oracle over SAS or vice versa and get hooked up with them for more strengths and weaknesses.

4. I have experience with Oracle running on AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX, however, none were with the same version at the same time. Rather than ask which OS is better, find a hardware platform which is scalable, CPU capacity on demand, for instance. Then ask the vendor(s) for references.

5. No direct experience here. Ask the vendor for their preference (if they have one). Otherwise, ask the vendor for references on each of the OS versions you are considering.

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The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was - Steven Wright

 

[dwspecialist]

1. What are the benefits of using an Oracle 10g warehouse over a SAS 9 warehouse?
You are not comparing Apples with Apples here, Oracle 10g warehouse just gives you a optimized framework to house your data warehouse in oracle. Whereas SAS gives you the actual DW objects (Metadata repository, Out-of-the-box schemas) for your data warehouse. You can implement a SAS Warehouse on Oracle 10g for instance. Better question would be "Why SAS, why not COGNOS or MicroStrategy or Siebel Analytics?" for example.

2. What are the benefits to using Oracle ETL tools over SAS ETL tools?
The only (infamous, if I may say so) ETL tool Oracle provides is Oracle Warehouse Builder which worked only on Oracle supported platforms (Oracle Financials, Peoplesoft, JDE) but I am not sure if they came out with better ETL tool. I would again compare SAS ETL with Informatica but again the underlying question is Why SAS? If you go with SAS, then you have to welcome the ETL tools and what not which comes with it.

3. Is there any benefit to using an Oracle warehouse if the ETL, analytic, portal, and reporting solutions are all SAS?
I think #2 will cover it.

4. What is the best operating system to run Oracle 10g on for a data warehouse?
In my experience, AIX serves to be like a glove in a hand for Oracle dbs but your DBAs would be the right people to discuss this question.

5. What is the best operating system to run SAS 9 on for a data warehouse?
I am sorry, cannot speak for this question,


dws.