Data Warehouse Design Solutions

First, the authors outline the promise--and potential hurdles--of data warehousing. They thoroughly explain the idea of dimensional data, which is used to represent the quantities or attributes that can be queried in a data warehouse. The authors argue that data warehouses need to adapt to changing business conditions and often must be more flexible than planned. They advise building the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) as a series of interlocking data marts (which contain different dimensions). Developers can build part of a solution and add new data marts later. The result is a more adaptable approach to warehousing data.

The heart of Data Warehouse Design Solutions is the descriptions of data warehouses tailored to specific industries--sales, marketing, fulfillment, production, inventory, and capacity--using real-world businesses. The authors offer business models, sample dimensions, database schema, and sample reports for each business area.

Later chapters discuss more advanced areas for data warehousing, including budget tracking, financial reporting (and managerial accounting), and even how to look at profitability and intellectual capital. The authors round out their nuts-and-bolts tour of today's businesses with a summary of the various measures that fit each type of organization. Finally, the authors come back to theory, with some ideas on building effective systems that are fast and that generate easy-to-read reports. The last chapter argues convincingly that their incremental approach to building data warehousing has some distinct advantages. --Richard Dragan

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

A very good complement to Kimball's books, 2003-03-31
I highly recommend this book and I think that it's a very good complement to Ralph Kimball books. It's based on the same principles and theory, and expands the number of practical examples based on real industry implementation, so if you are lucky you can find many tips and data models that can be immediately applied in your projects.
You need to read the Kimball books first in order to fully understand this one, and of course some of the example are based on US companies, but most of the material can be immediately applied to other markets and Countries as well (like Italy where I work).
I think that the last chapters (13/14/15) which deal with topics like presenting information and the process to build a DW are a little less interesting, but they still contain some useful tips.


7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

A very good complement to Ralph Kimball books, 2003-03-31
I highly recommend this book and I think that it's a very good complement to Ralph Kimball books. It's based on the same principles and theory, and expands the number of practical examples based on real industry implementation, so if you are lucky you can find many tips and data models that can be immediately applied in your projects.
You need to read the Kimball books first in order to fully understand this one, and of course some of the example are based on US companies, but most of the material can be immediately applied to other markets and Countries as well (like Italy where I work).
I think that the last chapters (13/14/15) which deal with topics like presenting information and the process to build a DW are a little less interesting, but they still contain some useful tips.


21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

A good handbook on dimensional modeling, 2001-04-04
If you do not have 'The Data Warehouse Toolkit' by Ralph Kimball yet, you may want to buy this book. The techniques and approaches discussed in these two books are almost the same. The way this book is structured is very much alike that of the Kimball's book. But I liked the fact that the chapters are dedicated to particular business areas, not particular industries. In the chapter about marketing you will find examples for three industries. I liked Chapter 13, 'Presenting Infomation' which is full of tips on effective reporting. I liked also the chapter on financial reporting which gives a technical reader basic ideas of what finance is about. You will learn about balance sheets, income statments, cost allocation from the point of view of a data modeler. Of course, the book has all the terms and techniques one has to know to successfully build dimensional models. I did not like though the last two chapters which deal with methodology questions. You will only get a slight idea about how to integrate dimensional modeling into your data warehousing project. You will have to buy one of those books on methodologies to get a better insight into the question. In general, the book is very interesting. I gave it four stars for minor flaws - no one is perfect!


16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

Excellent Real World models...., 2000-01-14
This book provides down-to-earth models for star schemas. And with each example, the authors examines different approaches for designing the stars and later gives the pros/cons of each approach. A very good book. A must for anyone who designs data warehouse databases.


8 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

No-Nonsense, 1999-07-01
This book from 1st page onwards talks about Data Modeling issues for Datawarehouse in a mature way. Also covers an important issue of integration of datamarts.

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