You wouldn’t build a road and not provide a map. Yet organisations build detailed data warehouse and business intelligence systems and do exactly that – struggle to provide the end user with the ‘map’ of the system, otherwise known as the metadata.
From Wikipedia – Metadata: An essential component of a data warehouse/business intelligence system is the metadata and tools to manage and retrieve metadata. Ralph Kimball describes metadata as the DNA of the data warehouse as metadata defines the elements of the data warehouse and how they work together.
Following the map analogy – metadata describes the roads between the towns, the towns themselves, their populations, features and attractions, tourist warnings for the unfamiliar, lists of places to eat and sleep…..
The familiar Google search interface has become so ubiquitous that its how most users expect to find information at home, but inside the enterprise it’s a different story because there are invariably seven to eight different places you have to look, often with different interfaces!
Imagine if users of your data warehouse could search for metadata with the ease of ‘Googling’ it - straight away we are providing what the user expects (and requires) to be able to use the warehouse efficiently and productively....the map!
With Oracle we’re lucky - the database provides us with out of the box functionality for building our map and letting users search for the towns…
[coming soon] Using Oracle to expose your enterprise metadata
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