Bob, I can't answer your questions directly, but I think, Tim Gorman's book - Essential Oracle8i Data Warehousing can. Re your signature: I just struggled today with an error message, It took me quite a while to realize why Oracle was telling me that the values keyword was missing. (An over-simplified version of the statement follows) Are Oracle error messages not keeping up with the code? SQL> Begin 2 Merge into emp e 3 Using (select * 4 from emp_temp) t 5 on (e.empno = t.empno) 6 when matched then 7 Update set 8 e.hiredate = t.hiredate 9 when not matched then 10 Insert into emp (empno, hiredate) 11 values (t.empno, t.hiredate); 12 End; 13 / values (t.empno, t.hiredate); * ERROR at line 11: ORA-06550: line 10, column 14: PL/SQL: ORA-00926: missing VALUES keyword chaim http://www.learntorah.net -----Original Message----- From: Bob Metelsky [mailto:bobmetelsky@xxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 10:18 AM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Info on VLDB/DW Good Morning All, I was hoping someone here can point me to pertinent documents which address (DW). I know there are tons of online docs via google or metalink but was wondering if people her had their own favorites. Im particullary interested in nutshell concepts of: 1 reasonable maximum datafile sizes & physical disk striping 2 getting data from prod to dw 3 various partitioning 4 stratigies for backup + recovery Thanks Bob -- "Oracle error messages being what they are, do not highlight the correct cause of fault, but will identify some other error located close to where the real fault lies." -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l