A separate work schema for a physical schema ?

Question

Hi,
The ODI best practices white paper tells us (p.47/48) to create a separate schema and designate that as the work schema for a physical schema. This, however means that the user with which we connect to the database needs to have powerful system privileges like CREATE ANY TABLE, DROP ANY TABLE depending on what you want to do. Many DBA's will object to this. A simpler solution seems to be to set the work schema to be identical to the physical schema.
Has anybody done this and experienced drawbacks/issues with it ?
Can anybody give any good arguments in favor of the best practice advising a separate work schema ?
thanks, Arjan

Answer 1

Arjan ,
I would like to suggest my opinion. The main reason for allocating the work Schema separate to the main schema is to have all the $ tables created separated so that while debugging we can choose to have them and drop them later and also mostly when the CKM is enabled the E$ tables are created and they are not dropped. there are also situation where dynamic $ tables are created so each time you run they $ tables are created and in case of failure or de bugging they remain . On the second attempt we have a new dynamic $ table. Think of a scenario where we have both of them in one place and the amount of unnecessary $ tables we have with our DW tables . Also if such a scenario have to happen in production box. Nobody would like to have such a scenario and then you need to either drop them manually or through another pl/sql codes . Thats the main reason its good to have a separate Work Schema.
Also we use the Work schema for creating stagging table at run time while ODI processing.
Secondly regarding permission and using the schema i have seen both the kind of environment where user used in topology is either the Work Schema or the Data Schema. Yes you would need to give certain permission or priviledges like Drop , create as $ tables have to have them but some dont give permission like Delete , truncate target tables .
Now if you make your DBA understand the architecture , he would surely provide the required permission for the Work schema tables to be created and dropped and i dont see any thing to worry, since $ tables gets created and dropped but yes the permission have to be in such a way the user used in ODI data server dont have the permission to drop the Data schema table , if you want have more restricited permission for truncate and delete too, but in development we would surely need truncate and delete too since we tend to load wrong data and logic . Think about it in a different scenarios and requirement.
Look at this link Cezar has spoken on this topic. -http://odiexperts.com/?p=672
hope this helps.