Tuesday, June 25, 2002
Data Warehousing. Two books that will interest architects, developers and DBAs are:
- Data Warehousing Fundamentals. This is one of the best introductory books on data warehousing I've read. The authors make few assumptions of reader knowledge beyond the fact that they are IT professionals who have a technical background that doesn't necessarily include database and data warehouse knowledge. They do assume a basic knowledge of IT operations, project management skills and systems analysis and design - skills that IT professionals are expected to have.
The book is divided into five parts: Overview and Concepts, Planning and Requirements, Architecture and Infrastructure, Data Design and Data Preparation, and Implementation and Maintenance. These follow a development life cycle, making the structure of the book easy to follow.
What I like about this book is it doesn't just cover the theory and concepts (which it does do well), but sets data warehousing in the context of a larger architecture designed to meet specific business requirements. I also like the way the authors address real world issues such as planning and managing a data warehouse project, and the issues and factors surrounding adding a data warehouse into an existing technical architecture. This information is what IT professionals are seeking when they are faced with a technology with which they may not have strong knowledge, and it makes this book useful to the intended audience.
Among the chapters that I most liked are: Principles of Dimensional Modeling, Data Extraction, Transformation, and Loading, and Data Quality: A Key to Success. These capture the essence of data warehousing in my opinion and are topics that IT professionals without a data background need to understand. I also thought that each of the appendices were useful. They provided a finishing touch by covering project life cycle steps and checklists, critical success factors and guidelines for evaluating vendor solutions - each of which provide practical information. - Data Warehousing and Web Engineering. This is a collection of papers that cover salient issues in data warehousing with an emphasis on business intelligence, data mining and knowledge management applications. While many of the papers in this book are more useful to technical professionals, there is a lot of material that will also be useful to marketing and competitive intelligence specialists in the business domain.
Some of the papers are more basic and introductory, such as "Justification of Data Warehousing Projects", "An Introduction to Information Technology and Business Intelligence" and "Some Issues in Design of Data Warehousing Systems". Some, however, address advanced topics such as "Data Mining Methods Databases and Statistics Point of Views" and "Incremental Data Allocation and Reallocation in Distributed Database Systems".
My personal favorite papers were "Specification of Components Based on the WebComposition Component Model" (reflecting professional interests in component-based development), "Complementing the Data Warehouse with Information Filtered from the Web", and "Using Business Rules Within a Design Process of Active Databases" (another area of professional interest).
In addition, the papers cover topics in data mining, data quality and knowledge management, which means that there is at least a few papers that will intersect with a reader's professional interests. The best audience for this book includes academics (the papers are citable), consultants who specialize in business intelligence and data mining, and organizations that have a solid base of experience with advanced uses of data warehousing.
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