I've had a chance to look at OWB9.2 now, and some details and background have been made available from the product team at Oracle.
The main themes for OWB9.2 are data quality, improvements to the mapping process,and metadata management. This is considered by Oracle to be a major release (hence the significance of the version number), and it needs to be installed in a separate ORACLE_HOME to any existing OWB installations. Metadata from OWB9.0.4 can be upgraded to work with this new version using the packaged MDL upgrade utility.
In essence, the functionality from Oracle Pure*Integrate (a standalone ETL tool based on technology from Carleton) has now been integrated properly into the OWB GUI, taking the form of changes to the name and address functionality and the introduction of advanced name and address matching and merging, together with householding to bring records together for customers living at the same address.
There is now a mapping debugger, allowing developers to walk through a mapping and see in detail what happens to the data.
The metadata change management is now in the UI. THis means there is now object level version management in Warehouse Builder via the UI. You can also compare versions and get a difference report
There are a number of smaller and bigger features next to this. According to Jean-Pierre Djicks, "The idea for this release is to make OWB a top Data Quality product and allow you to do your ETL and DQ in one tool. Apart from that we have added usability features (debugger, N&A wizard) and we have added some features to solve specific problems. Especially the corelated commit is interesting in that respect. You can now, in a map with multiple targets control the commit, and choose to either commit all targets or none, or commit them individually (current behavior)."
One area that's particulary of interest to myself is the OLAP functionality. We've been waiting now for the Oracle 9i 9.2.0.3.x patch that is a requirement for the Analytic Workspace functionality already present within OWB9.0.4; Oracle have confirmed that this patch, when it arrives, will work with OWB9.2, and in fact there is additional functionality around Composites that is only present in OWB9.2
The full list of new features for OWB9.2 is as follows;
- Correlated Commit (committing changes across all targets uniformly)
- Ability to create public database links
- Direct PEL (removes the need for temporary tables when exchanging partitions)
- Enhanced Flat File Support
- Mapping Debugger
- Incorporation of ETL functionality previously found in standalone Pure*Integrate
- Metadata change management using the OWB GUI rather than using OMB*Plus
- Multiple Name and Address Software Providers
- Name/Address Wizard
- New Public API for OWB
- Better support for Real Application Clusters
- Advanced Repository Security and Audit options
- Support for MITI metadata bridges to third-party products
You can read the full text of Jean-Pierre's posting on OTN about OWB9.2 here, and further details on OWB9.2 are due to be posted on OTN in the near future.
8:55:13 PM 
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