The Data Warehouse Toolkit: Practical Techniques for Building Dimensional Data Warehouses - Softcover

Kimball, Ralph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0471153370 ISBN 13: 9780471153375

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 1996

Synopsis

". . . one of the definitive books of our industry. If you take the time to read only one professional book, make it this book." -W. H. Inmon

One of the most dramatic new developments in database design, the dimensional data warehouse is a powerful database model that.significantly enhances managers' ability to quickly analyze large, multidimensional data sets. Written by the leading proponent of this revolutionary new approach, this valuable book/CD toolkit outfits you with all the nuts-and-bolts information you need to design, build, manage, and use dimensional data warehouses for virtually any type of business application, as well as software for querying dimensional data warehouses.

Employing many real-life case studies of data warehouses, Ralph Kimball provides clear-cut guidelines on how to model data and design data warehouses to support advanced multidimensional decision support systems. Beginning with the relatively simple example of a data warehouse for a grocery store, he progresses, step-by-step, through an increasingly complex array of business applications in retail, manufacturing, banking, insurance, subscriptions, and airline reservations. By the end of the book, you will have mastered the full range of powerful techniques for creating, controlling, and navigating dimensional business databases that are easy to understand and navigate.

On the CD-ROM you'll find:
* Software for querying dimensional data warehouses.
* Working models of all the databases described in the book.

About this title

Review

Ralph Kimball's The Data Warehouse Toolkit translates the author's extensive real-world design experience into a truly useful guide to building data warehouses for today's corporations. Written in a no-nonsense prose style, the author gives developers and managers the basics of designing, building, and running data warehouses that are effective and useful to upper management.

This book begins with the fundamentals of what data warehouses are and how they differ from traditional databases used in online transaction processing (OLTP). (Basically, data warehouses look at trends in millions of database records drawn from across organizations.) Once the author establishes this foundation, he solidly introduces the issues of data-warehouse design, using samples drawn from a wide variety of industries, including grocery stores, inventory warehouses, shipping, financial services, cable TV subscriptions, insurance, and travel. The author succinctly describes the relevant "dimensions" of each industry. (These are the values or features that management will most likely want to track for each industry. The data warehouse must be prepared to answer these "questions.")

The last section of the book covers the process of actually designing a data warehouse, from conducting user interviews to planning for the hardware needed to run a data warehouse (where databases easily run in gigabytes and include millions of records). This text also includes a discussion of how to create effective front ends for users (which will report the results of data-warehouse queries).

For its scope and intelligence, The Data Warehouse Toolkit is required reading for any developer or manager who wants to get a perspective on data warehouses before building one. --Richard Dragan

From the Publisher

This definitive guide succinctly explains how to build a data warehouse by using actual case studies of existing data warehouses developed for specific types of business applications such as retail, manufacturing, banking, insurance, subcriptions and airline reservations. Describes a powerful new model of data warehouse design, the dimensional data warehouse, that provides readers with the ability to quickly analyze complex information in order to make sound decisions. The accompanying CD-ROM includes a toolkit for building dimensional data warehouses and examples of all the databases discussed in the text.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0471153370
• ISBN 13: 9780471153375
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 374