Oracle Data Warehouse Tuning for 10g - Gavin Powell

"This book should satisfy those who want a different perspective than the official Oracle documentation. It will cover all important aspects of a data warehouse while giving the necessary examples to make the reading a lively experience.
- Tim Donar, Author and Systems Architect
for Enterprise Data Warehouses

Tuning a data warehouse database focuses on large
transactions, mostly requiring what is known as throughput. Throughput is the passing of large amounts of information through a server, network
and Internet environment, backwards and forwards, constantly! The ultimate objective of a data warehouse is the production of meaningful and useful reporting, from historical and archived data. The trick is to make the reports print within an acceptable time frame.

A data model contains tables and relationships between tables. Tuning a data model involves Normalization and Denormalization. Different approaches are required depending on the application, such as OLTP or a Data Warehouse. Inappropriate database design can make SQL code impossible to tune. Poor data modeling can have a most profound effect on database performance since all SQL code is constructed from the data model.