Building the Data Warehouse

One of the imprescindible books to start with datawarehousing and BI. A shame for Amazon to deliver it in a month and a half!

Excelente!!!!

On the money, Nickels!

I like it

excellent book!

A little over fifteen years ago, I was working for the then great, and now deceased, Chicago area consulting firm of Greenbrier and Russel. On their behalf, I was often called upon to speak publicly on matters relating to logical data modeling and relational database design. One of these occasions was a meeting of the Milwaukee chapter of the Data Administration Management Association. When I spoke before these wonderful folks, the speaker following me was one Bill Inmon. How could I have known then how close was I to one of the real future "rock stars" of the Data Warehousing World? (I must also report that some folks said I gave the better presentation that day. But that had everything to do with the excellent presentation graphics put together by the outstanding staff at G&R. Inmon, obviously, still lacks such artistic, professional support.)In any case, Inmon's book, now reviewed, is really quite a good introduction to the important, and still emerging, topic of corporate data warehousing. It is, as some other reviewers have averred, a bit light technically. However, it does provide something of a "soup to nuts" introduction to the topic. I was particularly struck by how nicely Bill dealt with the evident controversy still extant between what is styled as his data warehousing approach versus that of Ralph Kimball. Inmon respectfully cites Kimball in the corpus of this text. In so doing, he simply, and I'd judge fairly, illustrates the difference between the approaches, allowing his readers to reach their own conclusions. In the sometimes acrimonious world of technical debate, I found this approach refreshing and praise worthy.As a practitioner of many years in the discipline, I can recommend Inmon's book as an excellent and comprehensive introduction to the important and still emerging topic. God bless.

I read the 3rd edition of the book.It covers the data warehousing field completely - giving a 360 degree view to a reader. However it is not very readable. The ideas are expressed in a difficult way and you can not figure out the author's higher level of flow of thought while going through one specific chapter.There are too many diagrams. Nearly all are useless. They do not add any further clarity to the topic or the situation . If the topic will mention about a simple data flow from A to B then it will refer to a diagram which will have two rectangle boxes connected with an arrow and that is it. A mention of a slight modification in the same date flow will result in referring to a new diagram. This way of explanation frustrates the reader especially because mostly the diagrams are not placed on the same page where they are being referred to. You generally have to flip 2-3 pages to reach to the diagram page then you flip back to the topic page to discover that another reference is being made to another diagram 4-5 pages away. This frustrated me so much that I later skipped noticing the diagrams.The book does explains a lot of things around data warehousing but it lacks the tactic to mesmerize a reader .It is definitely not for a newbie as it requires good knowledge of the field to be able to grasp the abstractness of the ideas.If you can somehow remove the repetitive mentioning of differences between OLTP and DWH and the statement that DWH can not be build in one cycle, the book will literally shrink to half of its current size.

In my opinion Kimball vs Inmon is not a war of religion, they both have pro and cons in different situation. I believe people seriously interested in BI should read the book and take several advices from it. There are situation in which an Inmon design is good, there are some in which it isn't BUT to be able to judge you need to know both an be able to decide based on the customer's necessity.The pictures in the book are really ugly and useless, nevertheless the concepts are clearly stated and easily understandable. If I have to say something wrong about it is that you need to already know what a BI system is in order to get the most out of the book. It is not for newcomers but it is definetely a good book on BI.