Business Reporting on an OLTP Application

Question

We have an OLTP application using Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition, and plan to build a business reporting layer to meet the following needs.

• Sheilding complexity of the current OLTP database design
• Improving query performance of the current OLTP reports
• Providing read-only access to other applications
• Allowing business users to perform adhoc reporting

The solution we are thinking of is to create a DB cache layer using Oracle Materialized Views(MV) over the current OLTP. MV's would be denormalized and designed for reporting. MV log's would synchronize changes to the MV using incremental refresh.

My questions are,

1. Does this approach make sense (MV's)? Has anyone used MV's for building OLTP reporting solutions?
2. What are the drawbacks of this approach(MV)?
3. How about using Oracle CDC and tables, with procedures to perform the synchronize.
4. Any other approaches?

Thank you, Sherry