Chapter 6. Loading the Warehouse

Loading data should be the easiest part of data warehousing, right? Well, it's not. In fact, 90% of the problems in data warehouses for which I've been the production support DBA have been with the nightly batch cycles that load the data. In other words, when the beeper goes off at 2 a.m. four nights a week, it's usually because some data load batch job missed its “must start by” or “must complete by” time and therefore royally screwed up the remaining jobs for that cycle. The nightly paging was so bad on one project that my wife asked me to leave a perfectly good job because she needed her sleep (as it was affecting her job performance). Now that's serious!

So why is this true? Every developer who's ever worked ...

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