The Essential Guide to Data Warehousing

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Summary: It's not a technical book!
Review: If you want to guided to data warehousing, don't read this book. If you don't be misled, you must have wasted a lot of time on some irrelervant 'background' or details. This book is not for engineers, maybe for management team.

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Summary: Really useful and insightful book
Review: Lou Agosta's Essential Guide to Data Warehousing is readable, informative, humorous in subtle ways, and generally a delightful way to find out about an important part of the digital economy, data warehousing systems. This book explains the benefits, risks, technologies, and business processes of data warehousing with insight and clarity. If you have questions about data warehousing from a business or technical point of view, if you need to design and implement a system, this book will address your needs. I manage a data center for a living, operating terabytes of data. When designing a data warehouse - this is the book I will use.

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Summary: Things to Consider
Review: The title of this book is appropriate. This is not a "how to", but rather a "guide". Like a seeing eye dog that guides the blind, it leads you down the street...but it doesn't tell you how to walk. If you are looking for specific techniques, this book IS NOT for you. If you are looking for general information, potential pitfalls or design considerations, this IS a book for you. The book probably deserves a place on your shelf as a supplement to your library. I particularly like the chapter regarding metadata. The author gives a meaningful definition that is more useful than the standard "data about data."

Rating:
Summary: Things to Consider
Review: The title of this book is appropriate. This is not a "how to", but rather a "guide". Like a seeing eye dog that guides the blind, it leads you down the street...but it doesn't tell you how to walk. If you are looking for specific techniques, this book IS NOT for you. If you are looking for general information, potential pitfalls or design considerations, this IS a book for you. The book probably deserves a place on your shelf as a supplement to your library. I particularly like the chapter regarding metadata. The author gives a meaningful definition that is more useful than the standard "data about data."

Rating:
Summary: Fails to focus on solutions and design
Review: Though Lou Agosta's book is informative in presenting concepts and the process of building a data warehouse, the book never delves into true design. Just when a paragraph is describing an area where you are interested in, there is no examples to explain in detail how tasks should be accomplished. Basically, the book is strong on concepts but very weak in detail.

Also, the writing style is difficult to follow since it is filled with short sentences (if they really are sentences) that have no point to themselves. You have to read the next sentence then merge the two in your head to make a complete sentence. Even with these short sentences, it is amazing that the paragraphs are long (or should I say long-winded). What could have been stated in 2 CLEARLY written sentences usually took 2 paragraphs.

In summary, I would only recommend this book to someone who simply needs to manage the process without actually getting involved in the details. Even then, I have read other books that provide the same information yet are much clearer.

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Summary: Comment on The Essential Guide to Data Warehousing
Review: When I started writing this book last winter, it was the first book on data warehousing and knowledge engineering. It is still the ONLY book on data warehousing and knowledge engineering that has a complete, consistent definition of knowledge from both a technical and business point of view and can explain the relation (and difference) between them. This data warehousing book addresses business leaders and data warehousing beginners. It explains the benefits, risks, technologies, and processes with directness, insight, and clarity. The book shows how data warehousing can dramatically reduce business uncertainty by transforming a tidal wave of data into knowledge you can act on. The Essential Guide to Data Warehousing presents the quantitative business case and helps the business leader, manager, and information technology staff evaluate the key data warehousing applications and infrastructures in the context of your own enterprise. You will learn how to use data warehousing to reduce supply chain management costs, be more effective in cross-selling, strengthen customer and brand relationships, promote product quality, and more. The reader will discover how to align the business and technical goals for data warehousing. The data warehousing project lifecycle from planning through implementation and optimization is engaged. Understand what can go wrong and how to avoid it. Coverage includes creating unified representations of customers, products, and other essential structures; managing data quality as the key to successful data warehousing; the basic of data warehosuing technical design; guidelines for data warehouse operations; web-enabled data warehosuing, metadata and other key innovations. Ultimately the book will just have to speak for itself. The one slight bit of disagreement I have is that the back cover says the book avoids "the jargon and hype." I hope so. However, make no mistake about it -- and rest assured -- this book is fully buzzword compliant!!! In my opinion, the substantial twenty-five page glossary is itself worth the price of the book. Every technical term is defined at first use. Enjoy.