Customer Reviews
The best book on Data Warehousing. Full Stop. - By: John Ryan, 04 Sep 2008 
I bought the First Edition of this book over ten years ago, & it helped demystify some of my preconceptions about Data Warehousing. I since buillt upon my experience, along with several highly successful, highly performant warehouse solutionsin the Telecoms, Public Services & Banking industries.
In summary - this book works.
One of it's greatest strengths is that it is readable, & easily understood - despite the Initially unusual design techniques. Anyone with database design experience should have no problem following the concepts.
After an initial chapter on the "basics dimensional design" it then explores the subject chapter by chapter using "case studies". You're bound to find one industry you're familiar with, the subjects include Retail Sales, Inventory, Order Processing, HR & Financial Services.
Each case study, explores the fundamentalsin further detail, & introduces an additional concept for which a solution is provided.
It's far from a "cook-book" approach, but both myself & colleagues (I've keptin touch with two other people who swear by Ralph Kimball & the toolkit), have relied upon it for solutions through the years.
Take for example, the problem of modling a complex hierarchy of business units which can (in theory) have any number of levels, but users want to analyse data for "Ultimate Parent Companies" or for all the subsidiaries of a given company. Ralph has a solution.
In summary, if you're workingin the Business Intelligence industry, as a designer, architect or even an intested project manager - you should understand Dimensional Design techniques, & this is the book the explain them.
Ironically, an alternative book The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit: Practical Techniques for Extracting, Cleaning, Conforming, & Delivering Data, is suitable if either you're an ETL developer or simply want a good overview of the techniques. Also co-authored by Ralph Kimball, it provides a succinct overview of Dimensional Design along with a description of the thorny issue of ETL.
A good book - By: Var, 06 Nov 2007 1. I recommend this book for a beginner & advanced users for clear understanding on dimensional modelling.
2. I am happy to say, I received a replacement book since my first order was not delivered to me.
The Bible for starting a Data Warehouse project - By: Barry Ryan, 22 Sep 2007 Our organisation was establishing a BI competence centre. This book along with the othersin the series offered all the guidance needed to make sense of the terminology - & more importantly gave real-life worked examples rather than just theory. We bought it for everyone on the team.
A must have - By: Chris, 04 Dec 2006 I picked this up about 18 months ago as a primer, & it's still helping me today as I continue to develop new datawarehouse designs. Each time I have to do something for the first time, there's usually a chapterin the book for it. I feel a lot more comfortable having it on my desk!!
Excellent book - By: Ian Peter Avery, 07 Mar 2006 I found this book extrememly useful. I do not come from a database background, I'm more of an analyst but the concepts were well explained & it all made sense.
