Question

whats the purpose of the following software and tools in database warehousing? list some pros and cons.

vmware

oracle database

repository and workspaces

design center

Answer 1

Ans.)

vmware

Purpose-

• VMware vFabric™ GemFire® provides high-performance data management with in-memory speed and elastic scalability.

• VMware vFabric SQLFire is designed to handle structured data and is well-suited for IT teams with relational database experience using a familiar SQL interface.
• VMware vFabric Data Director and VMware vFabric Postgres enable a database self-service solution that leverages virtualization to increase IT agility and improve enterprise governance.

• vFabric solutions are designed for IT organizations to confidently manage data across private, public and hybrid clouds.

Pros-

• It provides a great remote access tool for accessing and managing servers in virtual environment. With the security risks surround remote desktop this provides a good alternative to do the same functions.

• The app itself is very lightweight and easy to install/maintain.

• Sandbox testing can be a time consuming thing to setup and do. Workstation makes this easy to create, use, and put away. This make you more willing to put new things in the sandbox and test them before production usage.

• The cost of workstation is very affordable for the functionality that you get and you can try it for free before you buy it.

• We use it to run apps that can be difficult to setup or conflict with other apps. We just spin this app VM up run it, and then shut it back down. The startup and shutdown is very quick.

Cons-

• It's not free? With all the money spent on a VMware environment, they could easily give this product away as a tool to use with the overarching products.

• Initial licensing can be a bit of a challenge as with any VMware product.

• We have never needed support as the product is very easy to use, but VMware as a company doesn't provide the greatest support.

• As you read the three things above, you will notice that we really don't have any ideas on how to improve the product as it works very well over all.

Oracle database

Oracle Database is able to efficiently leverage all hardware resources - multiple CPUs, multiple IO channels, multiple storage units, multiple nodes in a cluster.

Pros-

• Oracle Database 12c has the ability to scale to support intensive workloads.

• PL/SQL provides an efficient way to develop data-intensive processes that are able to interact with data without transferring it to an app server

• Partitioning, Compression and Encryption are some of the optional features that enhance performance, reduce costs and secure the information stored in Oracle Database 12c

Cons-

• New (actually it is more than five years old) multi-tenant architecture is not as straightforward as SQL Server, but it has been enhanced in Oracle 12c Release 2 and later 18c and 19c.

• Many features require additional licensing (either as options or as packs) that increase the total cost

Repository and workspaces

Pros:

• Separation of concerns; the application need not know about or track any or all data sources.
• The Repository pattern helps to isolate both the service and the list access code. Isolation makes it easier to treat them as independent services and to replace them with mock objects in unit tests. Typically, it is difficult to unit test the repositories themselves, so it is often better to write integration tests for them.
• DRY (Dont Repeat Yourself) design, the code to query and fetch data from data source(s) is not repeated.

Cons:

• Adds another layer of abstraction which adds a certain level of complexity making it an overkill for small applications.
• If you are caching data in heavily loaded systems, performance can be an issue. Consider synchronizing access to the data source. This ensures that only a single request for the data is issued to the list or back-end service. All other clients rely on the retrieved data.

Design center

The Design Center is the main graphical interface that we will be using to design our data warehouse, but we also use it to define our data sources. So let's take some time at this point to go over the user interface and familiarize ourselves with it.

But it does not provide the backend detail of the functions.