Customer Reviews

Web Farming for the Data Warehouse (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)

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Those of us that build Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence systems for a living have, for too long, focused on the analysis of internal corporate performance indicators, and short-changed the integration of external information that provides the context that leads to knowledge. Yes, we can report units sold, costs and profits, perhaps even ROI; but we have not done all that we can do to describe the relationship between these things and the theatre in which we operate: the stock market, interest rates, monetary exchange rates, the weather, political events, disasters, changing laws and regulations, new competitors appearing and old competitors dying off, etc., etc.

In short, we've been pretty good at answering "what" is happening within our organizations, but not so good at answering "why".

How best to remedy this? Richard Hackathorn does the industry a huge service by describing, in the most pragmatic way, why it is a good idea to take the acquisition and integration of external information with our operational business data very seriously, and he provides a number of pragmatic techniques for exploiting the expanding resources available on the Internet for precisely this purpose.

This is really quite exciting stuff - and my company, along with (I suspect) many others, has actually evolved its business model in order to more fully embrace the potential of some of the ideas expressed within this excellent book; I'm not sure that a more positive endorsement is possible.

Jim Stagnitto
Llumino, Inc.
www.llumino.com

Web Farming is a vital source of information about making intelligent use of the Web. The author (Richard Hackathorn) is a recognized expert in enterprise computing and middleware. He provides a roadmap for farming the Web to feed data warehouses -- planning, building the infrastructure, identifying information sources, extracting data, analyzing it, and presenting information.

Although Hackathorn co-authored Using the Data Warehouse (Wiley) with Bill Inmon, Web Farming is more than a data warehousing text. This book explains content-providers, protocols, standards, tools, discovery services, knowledge management, Web agents, and data mining software. It is a "must-read" for anyone who wants to exploit the potential of the Web as a virtual library and information delivery service.

Dr. Hackathorn's new book on web Farming is an important look at the merger of two major technologies - data warehousing and the World Wide Web. Readers will see the enormous value that can be gained from a systematic approach to collecting web information. Hackathorn's writing style makes the subject understandable to both the business manager and IT professional. The extensive list of resources is helpful to those who wish to quickly implement Web Farming systems.

I liked the conceptual portion at the beginning of the book. The idea of incorporating unstructured data with a data warehouse is something I've done in the past, and he makes a nice case for having both. The rest of the book is of questionable value.

There are many data warehouseing or web books that provide better overviews of protocols and standards, which take up space that could be put to more practical use explaining how to build systems rather than labeling parts.

The other big problem is that a lot of the book is dedicated to product information. It mentions products that vanished around the time the book was published (Junglee, for example). The information on companies providing data extraction, parsing and online information products and services is hopelessly out of date. So is information on metadata standards, which changed drastically from 1998 to now.

I have reviewed Dick Hackathorn's book, Web Farming for the Data Warehouse, and am very impressed. He has done an outstanding job of surveying the many aspects of this new but rapidly emerging field. His insight that "...the Web is the mother of all data warehouses" was only the starting point for the intellectual journey he describes in easy to digest prose. Known to many as the "father of middleware" because of his pioneering work early in this decade, Dr. Hackathorn is once again in the forefront of another technological wave.

Dr. Donald R. Deutsch, VP Sybase Middleware Development and Interoperability Ctr. Boulder, Colorado

Dr. Hackathorn's compendium of data farming theory, techniques, and resources is about the most useful guide you can find for understanding the mining possibilities of the sprawling Internet. Not too technical first half is readable, and the second half is a treasure-trove of tools and resources.

The book is an excellent survey on the state of the art in web-based information gathering. Dr. Hackathornn covers the gamut-its an A-to-Z resource for effective tools, data, and techniques for anyone who bears the dubious title of knowledge worker. WebFarming is well researched by an industry veteran on the cutting edge of web-based information gathering and business intelligence.

Jim Harding, Chief Technology Officer, Cartia, Inc