The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit: Practical Techniques for Extracting, Cleaning, Conforming, and Delivering Data

The book was damaged when delivered and the first 50 pages or so are torn. I would really appreciate if I can return and get a new copy.

This is one of the few references out there providing the building blocks of good ETL design. There is plenty of technical documentation and forums out there that are specific to one ETL tool or DBMS but this is a better starting place for ETL developers. It is required reading as ETL projects often take short cuts in design, data quality and metadata management and reporting. This leads to very expensive Data Warehouse administration costs and often a complete rebuild of load jobs. The book is relevent for people using most ETL or ELT tools and it will remain relevent for years even as the ETL products continue to advance and mature. It is targeted at DW but the basic flow of Extract, Clean, Conform and Deliver is suitable for most types of data loads. Good coverage of the alternatives to traditional overnight bulk loads in the section on real-time ETL systems (also describes Microbatch) as the businesses and the major ETL vendors shift to SOA.

A survival guide and a must have for every data warehouse architect. This book is written for architects - not for ETL developers. Written from the 10,000 foot level, many of the architectures and designs are `nice to haves' and would require tremendous commitments in resources to be implemented and thus may be too lofty for many organizations. HOWEVER, it is best to have a theoretical bulls-eye, a target to shoot for, and try to make small baby steps towards implementing the optimal solution, then not have a hypothetical utopia at all to strive for. Looking for a comparison of ETL tools and which ones do what best? You will not find this here. A great resource for DW Architects who may have many years of experience working on data warehouse projects but may have not had the opportunity of implementing some more elaborative meta data driven cleaning and conforming schemas - a truly interesting approach yet I'm not sure Ralph Kimball's design with the `survivorship support metadata' schema, could perform fast enough for some of the large data warehouse loading needs of larger organizations. Separating critical issues from insignificant ones is difficult from the reading, however, the framework and methodical approach to the steps of Extract => Clean => Conform => Deliver and the role and responsibilities of the actors, i.e, DW Architect, dimensional manager, fact table provider, ect., give the reader/architect some clear division of duties more then likely not clearly defined within the corporation. <br /> <br />Plenty of ERDs, actual SQL statements, templates and diagrams to use in your existing projects. <br /> <br />(...)

This book takes almost all issues in a data warehouse design and represents them oriented to ETL features. Actually, ETLing matches the whole of the data warehouse (more or less), so the need to describe them makes this book an autonomous work you can read without referring to previous books by Kimball. Besides, I think that some technical descriptions have been better performed here: in my experience it is impossible to undertake dwh activities without (at least) a sound knowledge about general features (indexes, use of a bulk loader vs. INSERT, etc.) of RDBMS, and this paper addresses them conveniently. On the other hand, the flat style used lacks to give evidence to the very significant issues, which happen so to be mixed up with less important statements; that demands to pay high attention while reading, but a blurring boundary between subtleties and trivialities seems to be a common shortcoming in dwh literature. Even with that flaw, the ETL Toolkit turn out as an outstanding reference to state of the art of dwh technology.

Ralph Kimball has rounded out his complete recipe for building fast, cost effective, robust and durable enterprise dimensional data warehouses with this immensely valuable addition to all IT & Data Warehouse professionals' bookshelves. Without a doubt ETL has been the biggest stumbling block to deploying and maintaining well architected data warehouses that stand the test of time. Ralph draws on his years of experience and engagement with thousands of projects and crystallizes the `Best Practices' into an effective application architecture for all ETL systems regardless of what tools projects use for implementation. In this thorough examination of the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process, Ralph identifies 38 critical functions that all ETL systems need to implement for success in the long haul. He thoughtfully lays out simple and practical approaches for how each of these functions can be implemented by projects with any size of budget. For many, the paradoxical nature of ETL (seeming trivial yet replete with endlessly complex details that constantly change) has been the proverbial straw that has broken the bank for many DW projects. Continual customer pressure to grow, improve performance, and quickly deal with changing business conditions have left developers and architects grasping for more powerful and flexible approaches to ETL that meet project timelines, yet evolve and improve with age. Armed with this enlightening roadmap, many DW professionals will be far better equipped to design and build systems that meet the challenges today and tomorrow.

In this book Ralph lays down a framework for constructing the DW ETL. This is useful not just in constructing quality ETL processes, but also because Ralph's works tend to 'set' standards in data warehousing. The format of this book is similar to the Lifecycle Toolkit. Ralph takes a very staged, logical approach to the material. Some sections are just great e.g. the chapters on Extraction and Development. A small amount of the material is repeated from the Lifecycle Toolkit and Dimensional Modeling books, but no more than is needed to make this book stand on its own. Also like the other books, this one takes a vendor agnostic approach. While this may increase the shelf-life of the book, I would have appreciated some comparisons between the major vendors out there today. Overall: I recommend this one as a buy, even if you have Ralph's other books.