The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling (Second Edition),   ISBN:9780471200246

Customer Rating: 

There are many aspects to setting up a data warehouse and I have not found a book which adequately covers enough of the bases to think that it gives enough information that I might actually be able to build a data warehouse from scratch. This book covers the fairly narrow domain of how should I setup the database schema for my data warehouse. So, if you're question is - how do I start setting up a database for my data warehouse, this is the book for you.

The book is unique in that it presents several case studies of how data warehouses could be setup. In some ways, these examples are so simplistic, that it hardly seems necessary to put them down. But along with each example, a different aspect of the data warehouse is explored and this is how the author has chosen to organize these topics in this book.

What appeared to be lacking was relating the new data warehouse schema to what you might already have in your production environment. If the examples were enhanced to show what the original production database schema looks like, that might give not only a better idea of how to create the schema, but how to translate it and the problems associated with that.

So much of data warehouse design is inter-related so the concentration on dimensional modeling is limiting and no generic book can ever describe the situation you are facing in real life. You might begin to suspect that the reason why data warehouse projects are so complicated and fail is because of books like this which specify a specific and non-intuitive method for constructing database. The methods described in this book are certainly not intuitive. In my experience, things like creating tables to represent dates and abandoning the natural pkeys in your prodcution schema (as is recommended by this book) tend to make things more complex and difficult to understand as a developer. So beware of implementing things from ths book that don't make sense to you, because they probably don't.

Customer Rating: 

...I'll be short after so many comments. What I like especially about this book:

- The business/industry based approach which leads quite naturally to different concepts per business (as the CRM outriggers due to the very large customer dimension). Nevertheless, as the authors point out, these concepts may also be valid in other businesses/industries. It is only a best practise example. I like very much this open connection between businesses and concepts, this is exactly how our world is like. I had so many deja-vus reading the book, now able to sort-in issues and concepts I encountered at my customers.
- It is EXCELLENTLY written, a real pleasure to read which I could not really stop since the beginning - like a good piece of fiction.

Customer Rating: 

This book is a great primer on data warehouses: what they are for, how data should be organized in the warehouse, and what you can do with it. There's no code or programming - just a solid explanation of the concepts along with many good examples.

This book was perfect for me. I have data that I needed to analyze; I understood normalized relational databases and pivot tables; I'd heard the jargon such as "star schema" and "snowflake schema" but didn't know exactly what they meant. This book put all the concepts together and moved my level of understanding up to a new level. I am not building the data warehouse myself but now I can talk the talk with those who are.

I had been using pivot tables in Excel to do some analysis, but had been frustrated at times by not being able to get things to work out as I wanted. After reading this book, I understand why - it was because I had not organized the underlying data correctly. To anyone with a relation database background, the organization of data in a data mart or warehouse is very different and goes against one's instinct to normalize and eliminate redundant data. Getting past that was key to getting my data right, and that's what this book did for me.

However, if you are the person who will actually be building the data warehouse, you will need to go beyond this book to one that shows you how to actually do what you need. For example, this book does not go into "details" like ETL - how you actually get data into the warehouse from the transaction database - and the other practical details you will need to know. This book is also database and tool agnostic - those are all details that you will need to find elsewhere once you understand the concepts here.

My only quibble is that this book is quite pricey for what you get.

Customer Rating: 

I love this book. I read every page and enjoyed each one of them. If you are into DWing and BI, I highly recommend this book.

Ash Sehgal

Customer Rating: 

A great book for exposure to dimensional data modeling, easy and relatively a fast read. Sometimes takes a somewhat idealistic simpler view as compared to a real system that contains over 10,000 tables with hundreds of fields but approach and theories are sound.