InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Oracle Warehouse Builder was slated to ship by mid-1999, but lengthy beta testing to ensure the product's quality and performance caused the delay, says Oracle VP Michael Howard.

The suite includes data warehouse modeling software, tools for generating PL-SQL code, a workflow manager, and gateway software to link multiple data sources to a data warehouse, as well as the Oracle8i database and Oracle's Enterprise Manager systems-management software. Data quality- management software Oracle acquired when it bought Carleton Corp. in November will be added to the suite in a few months. Pricing will be disclosed this week.

Honeywell Inc.'s Home and Building Controls unit in Minneapolis used a beta version of the suite to assemble a sales-revenue data warehouse. Oracle Warehouse Builder pulls data from Oracle financial applications and legacy systems and loads it into the data warehouse, which runs on HP-UX on a 32-processor Hewlett-Packard 9000 server. Jason Haughland, a consultant working at Honeywell, praises the system's ability to generate code with built-in error-checking capabilities. "The biggest benefits are its flexibility and manageability," he says.

Oracle Warehouse Builder's key attraction is that it offers warehouse design, warehouse administration, and metadata management capabilities in one suite. Says Hurwitz Group analyst Philip Russom, "They're giving users all the convenience of three tools rolled into one."