Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) has seen many changes lately. Keeping up with new features in the Oracle RDBMS can be challenging enough, but when you add changes to products, you may have your work cut out for you. This article explores some updates in OWB for Oracle11gR2 (plus some of the changes between 10g and 11g).
Starting with 11gR1, OWB users work in a workspace as opposed to having their own repository schemas as found in Oracle10g. All of the workspaces are owned by the OWBSYS account and are managed or stored within OWBSYS’s schema, which simplifies management of OWB objects within the database. Users within the database can be added as OWB users via the granted role of OWB_USER (it’s more than just granting a role, user management within OWB should be done within OWB).
When installing OWB, two operations are worthy of note. The first and probably most important is that OWB is installed along with the RDBMS software. There is no more companion CD and no starting up a separate Oracle Universal Installer session. The installation of OWB is clean, simple, and transparent.
Given that virtually all database users use a PC for things related to using Oracle, OWB has a client installation that is also quite streamlined. If installing OWB in a simple architecture (both client and server are on the same machine), the client software is also installed along with the RDBMS software. In a split architecture (client really is a client and not on the server), then the standalone client installation comes into play.
