Use Cases for Oracle Warehouse Builder

OWB can be used in a wide range of scenarios, centered on Oracle Database, and adds value as a solution for data integration, data movement, and data quality. The data systems you create with OWB are driven by rich metadata about sources and targets, and tight integration with, and awareness of, core features in Oracle Database. The ETL and data quality features provided by OWB add value in each of the use cases described in this section.

The most common use cases include:

• Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

• Master Data Management

• Data Migration, Conversion, and Modernization

• Data Profiling and Quality Management

Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

OWB can be used in the design of relational objects for your operational data store, and dimensional objects for the data warehouse performance layer. You can implement ETL processes for loading warehouses, including smart operators that simplify loading dimensional objects, even for complex loading processes required for slowly changing dimensions. OWB can implement business intelligence applications and data marts.

OWB can also be used to profile data sources and to develop or discover data rules. Data rules can be used to measure data quality, monitor, and enforce quality requirements during loading, or as an out-of-band process. Data cleansing logic can be incorporated into the warehouse loading process.

Master Data Management

OWB application adapters (or connectors) enable access to data stores representing critical business entities such as customers and products at a logical, rather than physical, level. This simplifies the design of data movement, data quality and data cleansing, and enrichment processes.

OWB data quality features can be used to discover, audit, and enforce the contents of your master data stores and their compliance with your data rules. Automated data cleansing and enrichment processes are easy to implement.

Data Migration, Conversion, and Modernization

OWB can be used to design the target for any migration or conversion process and can implement data movement processes. Data quality features offer high value in such scenarios as well. Data profiling of the source systems can reveal data quality issues before they are introduced into the new system. OWB can be used to profile source data, design the target system, and to implement and orchestrate complex data movement, transformation and cleansing processes without requiring custom code.

Data Profiling and Quality Management

Once you connect to your data sources in OWB (including Oracle databases, sources accessed through gateways, and flat file sources) you can apply full-featured data profiling to generate statistics about data quality, and to discover complex patterns, foreign key relationships, and functional dependencies. You can then design complex data rules and create data auditors to monitor compliance with those rules in any source or target system in your landscape, regardless of whether those sources are loaded using OWB or other ETL tools.

For customers who have selected solutions other than OWB for data profiling and data quality, these can be applied independently of the OWB ETL and design features.