Customer Reviews

Data Stores, Data Warehousing, and the Zachman Framework: Managing Enterprise Knowledge (Mcgraw-Hill Series on Data Warehousing and Data Management)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The foreword talks of this book as one of the great books of our time on IS architecture and knowledge management and the book lives up to being just that. Expand your mind . Read this book . A must read for all those working on Decision support systems and Knowledge management.

I wanted to love this book, but I really just ended up liking it. The presentation was complete and exhaustive, and that was a challenge. Ideas are often fragmented across chapters in deference to the book's organization and subject matter. I especially liked the glossary and the bibliography at the end.

I like the book's topics. I could find no faults with the ideas it presents. But this is NOT an introductory book by any means.

If you are a systems professional interested in data management, familiar with data warehousing and the Zachman Framework, then I think you will like this book too.

Otherwise this book is tough to recommend. It does describe the Zachman Framework really well, but there are other sources for that. It describes approaches to data warehouses and operational data stores, but again other sources to do that too and do it better, in my opinion.

Four stars for most of us data management types. Something less than that for the rest of us.

This is a useful book that I have bought multiple copies of over the years and given to users and technical teams. The Zachman framework is an ideal way to represent views of systems that are useful for the various stakeholders, from business leaders to the technical staff. The book explains the various views in the framework completely and in plain English, useful for talking outside the IS shop and selling concepts. The value of this book is in how solidly it reinforces the critical nature of data and importance of good data management, even beyond the warehousing level.

The purpose of the book is not to provide a blueprint so that you can plug in components and, voila, your warehouse is built. It is to provide a framework, a set of parameters, a way of looking at the task of building the warehouse. Probably explains why they call it the Zachman Framework and not the Zachman Blueprint.

Instead of the traditional life cycle, or "waterfall" approach to development, the Zachman framework presents architecture for organizing the perspective of the planner, owner, builder, designer and programming subcontractor. Traditionally we may be very good at thinking about data and function, but Zachman adds the dimensions of network, organization, schedule and motivation. Laying out these perspectives in a matrix allows the different roles to communicate better.

In the framework matrix, for some combination of perspectives there are tools available, but for many there are not, so the methodology is uneven. The framework presents an organization of metadata associated with organizing the artifacts or a project, particularly emphasizing the important of metadata about people, location, and motivation.

If your are looking for a warehouse design/blue print book, addressing data staging or star schemas then this book is not the best for you, but if you are looking for a book that offers a means of communicating between the data roles and stresses the need for guiding principles this book would be useful.

Building a Data Warehouse is like building a house or a maschine. Well, yes in a very general sense. This book is about analogies, but analogies are not sufficient to build something. This book is unfortunately to vague to be usefull