Data Warehouse Loading

Data warehouses or data marts have become an integral part of many businesses. Data maintenance in these databases includes refreshing existing data and adding more data from transactional and operational databases. Typically these operations are performed on a routine basis and can be quite time consuming. This can be considered a different form of data replication because data is duplicated from several other databases.

Oracle Streams can be used to capture changes made to operational databases. These changes can be stored in an intermediate database before being processed and applied to the data warehouse. This eliminates the periodic data extraction process. Oracle Streams can also directly apply these changes to the destination tables in the data warehouse, keeping the data in those tables up to date.