Oracle ETL the right way

Mark Rittman has a review of "Oracle DBAs Guide To Data Warehousing And Star Schemas", and some excellent commentary on Oracle ETL, with detail and examples on external tables, pipelined table functions, and the MERGE command that demonstrate how to perform a complete ETL function without staging tables or using SQL*Loader.

The theme is to use native Oracle tools and show there's little need for high-end ETL tools in an Oracle environment. This is a given of course, but to me, there is value in having an ETL process independent of the back end. Every major vendor, and also MySQL, are introducing major improvements in the RDBMs shortly, and there's a risk in throwing one's hat in with any single vendor. And when there's a chance to save 6 figures by migrating the data store, it is a good option to visit from time to time. More on that theme in a later article.

On a much more elementary note, I stumbled across a good introduction to Oracle Data Warehousing concepts,
A Practical Guide to Data Warehousing in Oracle, which is actually Part 5 in a series.

Also, Mark Rittman also announced the start of an Oracle 9i/10g OLAP Mailing list.