Customer Reviews

Dimensional Data Warehousing with MySQL: A Tutorial

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

 

 

I had skimmed through the authoritative Toolkit books and found them very verbose. This book is a very hands on no-nonsense introduction to Data Warehousing.

One of the thngs that this book provided that I haven't seen in any other DW books I've come across is actual MySQL scripts used to demonstrate each lesson. If you have read a few Data Warehousing books, you'd read that the ETL (Data loading) part is the most complex piece and most books won't go into detail how its done. This book provides detailed scripts on how one goes about getting data from a production database into the Data Warehouse. I think this alone is worth the price of the book!

I come from the OLTP side of the business having written many J2EE apps for e-commerce, content systems and enterprise intergration projects. My 15+ years of experience made me ill prepared for a BI project - I didn't have a clue what a "star schema" meant.

The chapters of this book are very easy to follow and in no time I totally understood the principles and practices behind OLAP, and felt comfortable enough to set up a very simple Data Warehouse.

I'm surprised this book isn't more well known as I can't recommend it enough!

I'm new to MySQL and this was my first book on the subject. The author has done a great job of writing for a specific skillset and not wasting our time with alot of fundamentals or too advanced stuff. I'm somewhat learning challenged and found the organization of the material to aid greatly in my grasp of the subject.

I found this book very disappointing. This book contains just one kind of information - simple MySQL implementation descriptions for standard data-warehouse structures. There's no discussion of what data-warehousing is, why you would do it or why a particular structure is better or worse than another.

I can only imagine that this book would be useful if you happened to be a data-warehouse expert with a very poor grasp of basic MySQL usage. It's hard to imagine anyone with even a small amount of MySQL experience finding this book useful.

And just a final note, the book's example are focused on using MySQL on Windows XP. Who in their right mind would build a data warehouse on MySQL running on Windows XP? The section on setting up a scheduled job using Windows XP's scheduled task wizard is hilarious!