Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book on Advanced Dimensional Modeling
Review: This advanced book by Ralph, which continues on themes that he presented in the Data Warehouse Toolkit, covers advanced topics such as how to deal with "monster" and heterogeneous dimensions besides giving us more details on aggregations.This is the only book I have seen so far that deals with Lifecyle issues DW concretely. My only complaint is that this book does not discuss projects such as the ones in his DW Toolkit book that made it so popular.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, complete resource for a data warehouse project
Review: This book completely surpassed my expectations. Not only does it provide a roadmap for the project along with detailed steps, but it also comes with documentation templates on a CD sold with the book! The book and templates significantly reduced my documentation time. This is an excellent resource for project managers.
Rating: 
Summary: Comprehensive and thought provoking
Review: This book covers the complete life cycle including project management, requirements definition, technical architecture design, dimensional modeling, physical design, data staging, and finally deployment and maintenance. I think his approach to planning is a good one, and I am fighting to find the necessary business sponsor and a clear business motivation. Their approach to interviewing key players is a good way to collect requirements. The importance of conformed dimensions and building a data warehouse bus architecture matrix is a great exercise. Some of the controversy with respect to his advocacy of denormalizing has to do with how "pure" your warehouse is. For example if I am merely providing analysis of production data or querying vertically across data marts, I would retain the data in normalized E/R, but present a more dimensional view to end users. I appreciated the discussion on back room versus front room metadata and using active metadata to drive operations. I was disappointed with the lack of discussion of warehouse testing with only a few pages on data quality and cleansing during data staging, and just one paragraph on balancing between the warehouse and production data. This book is very useful, and the accompanying CD will save time creating your own project documents.
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Summary: A 'must' for any corporate DW project
Review: This book describes a methodology (process) for building DWs - this helps in managing the project and alleviates project risk, especially in corporate settings. Many DW contractors are reluctant to follow any type of methodology ("lifecycle reluctance") - these are the ones that take twice/thrice as long to finish the projects. Being paid per diem, they make more with delays and extensions (a moral hazard). Excuses include - they have an "eclectic" or "best of breed" approach that is unique to each implementation, therefore no defined & documented process methodology. You simply cannot build complex systems without a well-defined methodology.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent discussion of data warehousing from head to toe
Review: This book is invaluable for anyone involved in a data warehouse or data mart project. Kimball's discussion of the data warehouse bus is particularly useful now that data marts are exploding all over the enterprise. Definitely add this book to your library, but beware that you will probably want additional references dealing with SMP, MPP, and NUMA platforms in more detail. In addition, check out "Data Mining Solutions: Methods and Tools for Solving Real-World Problems" for a strong introduction to Data Mining and Visualization.
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Summary: Fantastic, the best I've seen on the subject
Review: This book is terrific. I've been involved in implementing a data warehouse, and I wish I'd had this book then, as the author proposes solutions to several problems we encountered, but had less elegant, or no, solutions for. I have read a number of books on data warehousing, and a major portion of every one of them is devoted to the politics of getting management to adopt, and then support, building a data warehouse, and very little on the concrete aspects involved. This book is almost entirely on the nuts and bolts of actual doing the implementation, assuming it is already supported by management. Presents how to do dimensional (star schema) models from elementary to highly advanced. Every important aspect of implementing a data warehouse is covered with real content at all points. Wonderful resource book for the experienced warehouse person, while also extremely helpful the the novice, and anyone in between. Read this book first, then peruse any others in the book store before buying--you may not need a second book.
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Summary: A concise depiction of data warehousing methodology.
Review: This book is the second in a series from the author and more concisely describes not only data warehouse methods, but also the pitfalls. Most people unfamiliar with data warehousing methods think it is simply "cloning" data. As the president of a company who implements data warehouses, we concur with Mr. Kimball and the fact that data warehousing is a "process" and the users of the data warehouse are the single most important criteria to building it. Mr. Kimball takes you through the difficult task of determining your "readiness" for a data warehouse and walks you through the entire process. This book is not for novices, but rather for the experienced individual(s) interested in exploring methods for implementing a solution that historically has at least a 50% chance of failure before it even begins. This book is an architects blueprint, crystalizing the reasons for such a high failure rate and how to avoid the common pitfalls. It won't build the data warehouse for you, but it should be mandatory reading for anybody involved in a data warehouse project.
Rating:
Summary: A good book to start learning data warehousing.
Review: This book will give you understanding of what you should bear in mind while you are building a data warehouse. It is equally good for the beginners and for people doing data warehousing for some time. The effort of getting everything in one book deserves respect. The chapters on dimensional modeling are very good (the author is famous for popularization of this modeling approach). The CD-ROM wich goes with it is quite usefull and can save you a lot of time if you are starting from scratch. Nevertheless, after you have read the book you will go and look for books dedicated to particular areas of data warehousing, like metadata or data quality, since they are not dealt in detail there. I would have rated the book five stars if there was not an explisit agression against ER-modeling which I believe has its own place in data warehousing.
Rating:
Summary: Definitive
Review: This is an excellent book -- probably the best systems book I have read. It presents a great deal of useful information in a surprisingly accessible manner. I highly recommend it for anyone involved with a data mart or data warehouse. Also, the accompanying CD is actually useful.
Rating:
Summary: A must read for data warehouse implementors.
Review: This new book by Ralph is culmination of his articles after his first book. This book is a must read for data warehouse implementors and for modelers who want to follow Dimensional Modeling. His template on the CD-ROM for the Project Plan, activities and responsibilites will surely help Project Managers of data warehouse to make thier project plan.
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