Increasingly companies are recognizing the value of an enterprise data warehouse (EDW). A true EDW provides a single 360-degree view of the business and a powerful platform for a wide spectrum of business intelligence tasks ranging from predictive analysis to near real-time strategic and tactical decision support throughout the organization. In order to ensuring the EDW will get the optimal performance and will scale as your data set grows you need to get three fundamental things correct, the hardware configuration, the data model and the data loading process. By designing these three corner stones correctly you can seamlessly scale out your EDW without having to constantly tune or tweak the system.

The paper is divided into four sections:

• The first section deals with the key aspects of configuring your hardware platform of choice to ensure optimal performance.
• The second briefly describes the two fundamental logical models used for database warehouses.
• The third outlines how to implement the physical model for these logical models in the most optimal manner in an Oracle database.
• Finally the fourth section covers system management techniques including workload management and database configuration.