Corporate Information Factory

What a number of previous reviewers did not realise is that this book is about data warehouses, and not enterprise architecture, even though it is named to seem that way. This book is an excellent high level overview of data warehouses and should be read by anyone who is going to be building a data warehouse from scratch or needs a starting place to learn about data warehouses. It explains all the concepts that are involved in building a data warehouse and explains what things can cause problems when implementing one. It will not, however, describe the technical details on how to implement the data warehouse or many of the structures within it. That kind of information is readily available in many other books. This is a perfect starting point for learning about data warehouses and especially good since it is a quick read and will not waste your time with a lot of wordiness.

If you are planning or considering integration of your corporate data, then you should read this book. Written by Bill Inmon (father of the data warehouse concept), Claudia Imhoff (founder of Intelligent Systems) and Ryan Sousa (CTO Intelligent Systems) this book describes an architecture and methodology for integrating operational and informational systems. Of special interest to me were the metadata and internet chapters.