The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling

I was undecided if I should buy this book after having read the first edition, but I'm happy I did. The second edition updates many of the concepts contained in the first and includes some new chapters on hot topics like CRM and Telecommunications (which is the most important sector for dw at least here in Italy where I live). I think that Kimball books are everything that's needed to design good, robust and flexible data warehouses, and this book maintains his high quality standards.

There are a lot of data warehousing books out there that try to answer the question: 'Why'? Why data warehouses are needed to help businesses make better decisions - why the OLTP systems that run the business can't do this - and sometimes even why businesses ought to invest in data warehouses. These books were terrifically useful to us years ago, when we needed help (and scholarly footnotes) in our data warehouse project proposals. This book is not one of those - it is all about: How How to actually design and build a repository that will deliver real value to real people. In this reviewer's opinion, Ralph Kimball's many contributions related to the 'how' of data warehousing stand alone. An engineer wishing to jump-start his or her data warehouse education would need to read Ralph's Data Warehouse Toolkit first edition, his Data Webhouse Toolkit... a bunch of "Data Warehouse Designer" Intelligence Enterprise magazine articles... AND lurk on the Data Warehousing List Server...for a few years (all terrific resources - by the way) - in order to stockpile the knowledge that is crisply presented here. No shortcuts taken by the authors that I can spot: all of the toughest dimensional design issues that I've tripped on - and that I can remember surfacing on in discussion groups over the past few years - are addressed in this significantly updated text. Not all of the solutions are 'pretty' - but it is clear that they thoughtfully address the problem. This approach, in my opinion, instills student confidence - and lets us know that we are getting sound instruction - not dogma. The authors have been listening to and addressing the data warehouse community's 'pain' through periodicals and posts for years - but this book pulls these point solutions together very nicely. I learned a surprising number of really useful new techniques, and was genuinely enlightened by the 'Present Imperatives and Future Outlook' section. As in the first edition, there is minimal philosophical lecturing, and zero religion. Instead, we get generous helpings of real-world case studies - aptly applied to progressively more advanced series of design concepts. This style absolutely works for me. And I suspect that engineering mindsets typical of the folks that build these things will likely agree. In short, the Data Warehouse Toolkit Second Edition will significantly lighten the load of books that I carry between data warehouse engagements. Jim Stagnitto Llumino, Inc. www.llumino.com

This book contains concepts and implementation methodology associated with building and deploying a data warehouse. To understand data warehouse, it is important to understand the difference between an OLTP system and a data warehouse (an OLAP system). The author first emphasizes this difference before getting into the nitty gritty of data modeling. The author is a leading advocate of Dimension modeling. He gives clear reasons for doing so and then jumps into the techniques for dimension modeling, also called as Hub-and-Spoke architecture. Book contains examples (in the form of chapters) of data warehouse models for many verticals such as shipping, insurance, banking, subscriptions, inventory. Going through these examples will help anyone to understand data modeling and to create a dimension model based on specific requirements. The best book for fundamentals of data warehouse and especially, Dimension modeling.

For people who have a transactional database background, such as myself, and are moving into the data warehouse arena, this book should be the bible! Kimball eloquently shows how a company's business model and thier data needs can be meshed perfectly, and leaves the reader wondering why this is not done in every case. In fact, he actually answers that question several times throughout the book.The real-world examples serve to cement Kimball's concepts in your mind and you try to forget most of you've learned about how to construct normalized, transactional databases.This is actually the first software "textbook" I've enjoyed reading in my 15 years as a database designer.

Every once in a while a technical book comes along that changes the way the world looks. "The Data Warehouse Toolkit" is just such a book. If you have spent your career in the world of relational database models, you owe yourself a read of this book to see a new and different paradigm. This book shows where the "rubber meets the road" for data warehouses accessed by end-users to answer real business questions. As a technology consultant specializing in data warehouses, I don't leave home with out the book I have now used to build data warehouses on three continents.. Kimball presents not only a new way to view data organization, but also provides the practical information necessary to apply it to the real world (with examples on CD-ROM including a live OLAP tool). The multidimensional model with relational database management systems described by Kimball is the key to success for any sizable data warehouse. We don't call it "The Bible" for nothin'.