Datawarehouse Tutorial

Question

My boss has discovered a new magazine which mentioned data warehousing. Thus I am in search of a good tutorial or book on data warehousing. I will also accept recommendations on ways to stop my boss reading.

Answer 1

Try looking at the stuff from Bill Inmon, don't be put off by some of his books/articles being 10+ years old the basics of Datawarehousing are refreshingly unchanged in that time.

As for stopping your boss from reading how about a new set of crayons?

Answer 2

Here is how you stop him:

Mention the costs and risks of data warehousing:

1. Now your competitors have a single target for industrial espionage!
2. You need a bunch of expensive servers ($$$) and a multitier storage system with redundancy in case of failure (more $$$)
3. Hires: you need to hire personnel to manage and maintain the warehouse. Lots of them, probably. Money that might be better spent on your core business.
4. The warehouse may not enable you to do any analytics you couldn't do before (albeit more slowly). It's only worth it if your production system is already bogging down with reporting and analytics.

Answer 3

haha, time for Kimball vs Inmon flame :-)

I highly recommend reading the "bible" of practical data warehouse design:

http://books.google.pl/books?q=data+warehouse+toolkit

Answer 4

There are two primary authors on data warehousing:

• Bill Inmon - who mostly writes about large enterprise data warehouses
• Ralph Kimball - who mostly writes about smaller, departmental data warehouses

It's a good idea to get familiar with the ideas of both.

Data warehousing is a mature and complex field, one that you're unlikely to be very successful with unless you've got a lot of experience in it, or have a very simple project. This can and should deter most people from just jumping into these projects. On the other hand, we're now at a point in IT in which the integration and analytical features of a data warehouse are becoming increasingly demanded by users and customers. So, it's probably a good idea to do an evaluation of what it offers.