Customer Reviews

Building the Operational Data Store

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The ODS is probably one of the least understood and most confusing concepts within the Corporate Information Factory. Most likely because it is, by definition, a compromise, in both purpose and design, between operational and decision support systems. Although Inmon generally does not write with the clarity of Kimball, after reading this book most confusion about the ODS should be eliminated. The author does a good job of describing the concepts as well as deeper issues such as high and low level ODS designs. About half the book is really good while the other half will either be redundant to anyone in the industry (Managing an ODS, Role of Standards, Hardware and Software Requirements) or contains information mainly to "pump up the volume" (Big glossary, Project Milestones, Articles of Interest). Overall though it's pretty good and required reading.

Without previous experience on data warehousing or ODS, you will be killed by this book. So many confusing topics need to be figured out by yourself. Not for beginner!
However, some ideas/concepts in the book are very important for a correct implementation of ODS:
bring star-join to ODS,
classification of ODS,
bring Object oriented methodology to ODS

To be objective, the author really invented something new, but he did not need to write a book; a 30-page white paper will do the job perfectly.

I am a big fan of Ralph Kimball's data warehouse books. I was looking for a similar book for operational data stores, and had hoped this would be it. I was disappointed. There is a good bit of information in this book, but it is not written with the clarity of Kimball's books. The biggest disappointment though is the lack of real examples of ODS data models. I expect examples to be less "definitive" for an ODS than for a DW, nevertheless I desire something more tangible than what is presented in this book.

this book presents some good ideas about ODS, especially the first a few chapters. But the rest of this book is really boring. I even could not finish reading the whole book. The author worry about too much of nothing. Most of the topics are out of date or useless.