Upgrading Warehouse Builder
I have mentioned here before that one of our customers has a BI system based on an Oracle 9.2 Data warehouse and uses OWB 9.2.0.8 for the majority (but not all) of the ETL processes. For various reason linked with vendor certifications the system was frozen at Oracle 9. We wanted to upgrade the database but needed to roll-out various other changes first. And as the customer works in a retail environment there are various trading periods (such as Christmas and the New Year, and fiscal year end) where any change to the IT systems running the business, and BI runs a significant part of the stock policy and supply chain side of organisation, is blocked.
We can now start work on the OWB upgrade. This was planned soon after Paris was released as OWB 10.2. Last year we planned a two step upgrade to take us through OWB 10.1 as direct upgrade was not supported. But, being true professionals we always read the latest documentation before starting on a project. What we knew 4 months ago may not be true now. And in this case our caution was vindicated. The OWB 10.2.0.2 patchset allows us to migrate directly from 9.2 to 10.2.
It pays to re-read the release notes!