Features and benefits of OWB
Before we move on to the next chapter, let's take a moment to recapitulate some of the features that the Oracle Warehouse Builder provides to us to make our job easier. This is why we made the choices we did for our design and implementation. By providing us with the option to implement our cubes and dimensions either relationally with ROLAP or fully multi-dimensionally with MOLAP, OWB allows us to design one way in OWB and implement either way in the database with a simple change of a storage option.
By providing us the ROLAP option, the Oracle Warehouse Builder opens to us the design features of cubes and dimensions even though we'll be implementing them relationally with tables in our database. Choosing that option rather than just implementing tables directly saves us from having to worry about dimension keys, sequences to populate them, and providing lookups of dimension record keys to fill in for our cube. When loading a dimension, all we have to do is...
