The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This groundbreaking book is the first in the Kimball Toolkit series to be product-specific. Microsoft’s BI toolset has undergone significant changes in the SQL Server 2005 development cycle. SQL Server 2005 is the first viable, full-functioned data warehouse and business intelligence platform to be offered at a price that will make data warehousing and business intelligence available to a broad set of organizations. This book is meant to offer practical techniques to guide those organizations through the myriad of challenges to true success as measured by contribution to business value.

Building a data warehousing and business intelligence system is a complex business and engineering effort. While there are significant technical challenges to overcome in successfully deploying a data warehouse, the authors find that the most common reason for data warehouse project failure is insufficient focus on the business users and business problems. In an effort to help people gain success, this book takes the proven Business Dimensional Lifecycle approach first described in best selling The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit and applies it to the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 tool set.

Beginning with a thorough description of how to gather business requirements, the book then works through the details of creating the target dimensional model, setting up the data warehouse infrastructure, creating the relational atomic database, creating the analysis services databases, designing and building the standard report set, implementing security, dealing with metadata, managing ongoing maintenance and growing the DW/BI system. All of these steps tie back to the business requirements. Each chapter describes the practical steps in the context of the SQL Server 2005 platform.

Intended Audience

The target audience for this book is the IT department or service provider (consultant) who is:

• Planning a small to mid-range data warehouse project;
• Evaluating or planning to use Microsoft technologies as the primary or exclusive data warehouse server technology;
• Familiar with the general concepts of data warehousing and business intelligence.

The book will be directed primarily at the project leader and the warehouse developers, although everyone involved with a data warehouse project will find the book useful. Some of the book’s content will be more technical than the typical project leader will need; other chapters and sections will focus on business issues that are interesting to a database administrator or programmer as guiding information.

The book is focused on the mass market, where the volume of data in a single application or data mart is less than 500 GB of raw data. While the book does discuss issues around handling larger warehouses in the Microsoft environment, it is not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with the unusual challenges of extremely large datasets.

About the Authors

JOY MUNDY has focused on data warehousing and business intelligence since the early 1990s, specializing in business requirements analysis, dimensional modeling, and business intelligence systems architecture. Joy co-founded InfoDynamics LLC, a data warehouse consulting firm, then joined Microsoft WebTV to develop closed-loop analytic applications and a packaged data warehouse.

Before returning to consulting with the Kimball Group in 2004, Joy worked in Microsoft SQL Server product development, managing a team that developed the best practices for building business intelligence systems on the Microsoft platform. Joy began her career as a business analyst in banking and finance. She graduated from Tufts University with a BA in Economics, and from Stanford with an MS in Engineering Economic Systems.

WARREN THORNTHWAITE has been building data warehousing and business intelligence systems since 1980. Warren worked at Metaphor for eight years, where he managed the consulting organization and implemented many major data warehouse systems. After Metaphor, Warren managed the enterprise-wide data warehouse development at Stanford University. He then co-founded InfoDynamics LLC, a data warehouse consulting firm, with his co-author, Joy Mundy. Warren joined up with WebTV to help build a world class, multi-terabyte customer focused data warehouse before returning to consulting with the Kimball Group. In addition to designing data warehouses for a range of industries, Warren speaks at major industry conferences and for leading vendors, and is a long-time instructor for Kimball University. Warren holds an MBA in Decision Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and a BA in Communications Studies from the University of Michigan.

RALPH KIMBALL, PH.D., has been a leading visionary in the data warehouse industry since 1982 and is one of today's most internationally well-known authors, speakers, consultants, and teachers on data warehousing. He writes the "Data Warehouse Architect" column for Intelligent Enterprise (formerly DBMS) magazine.

From the Back Cover

As longtime data warehousing practitioners and former Microsoft insiders, authors Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite have extensive experience in building and managing data warehouse (DW) and business intelligence (BI) systems. With this book, they share best practices for using SQL Server 2005 to build a successful DW/BI system. Covering the complete suite of data warehousing tools that accompanies SQL Server 2005, they focus on the full project lifecycle, including design, development, deployment, and maintenance.

You'll learn how and when to use BI tools such as Analysis Services, Integration Services, and the SQL Server database to accomplish various data warehousing tasks. A helpful case study used throughout the book provides examples of the techniques presented. You'll find practical guidance for every member of the data warehouse team and learn how to:

• Identify high-value business requirements and build organizational support for the project
• Design an information infrastructure for the enterprise using established dimensional design
• Design and build a flexible and powerful ETL system to clean, align, and restructure data for business use
• Provide decision makers with tools to analyze business problems and opportunities
• Use data mining to uncover data relationships and trends
• Build BI applications in Reporting Services
• Maintain, secure, and operate the DW/BI system

Visit the companion Web site at www.wiley.com/go/MsftDWToolkit

The companion Web site contains all the code samples, the sample database used throughout, sample templates, and other job aids.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 792 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (February 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471267155
• ISBN-13: 978-0471267157
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #28,771 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #10 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Databases > Data Warehousing
  #26 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Microsoft > Development > SQL Server
  #45 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Databases > Database Management Systems

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not a "How To", it's a methodology, August 7, 2006

By	Craig (Racine, WI) - See all my reviews

Excellent book for middle to upper management to learn the 10,000 foot overview of data warehousing. Reading this book can give you all the jargon you'll need to smooze your fellow IT personnel across a conference room table about data warehousing.

Unfortunately, I was looking for a book that would actually spell out HOW TO use SQL Server 2005 Integration Services and Analysis Services.

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Home Run From the Kimball Group, March 10, 2006

By	Jim Stagnitto (New Hope, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Perhaps, like me, you consider yourself a data warehousing professional with some hard-won expertise? Perhaps you too have stockpiled a number of assumptions about "what works" and "what doesn't" when it comes to building large, grown-up data warehouses? Candidly - for me - the "what doesn't" category - for some years now - has included the Microsoft SQL Server DBMS. This perception was shaped by some bad experiences - 100 years ago - with early SQL Server products. Beautiful interfaces and literature promising administration-lite databasing did little to instill confidence back then, and (in my unscientific survey) the products failed way too frequently (and sometimes in spectacular fashion) when dealing with data volumes larger than a breadbox. But, in typical Microsoft fashion, the shortcomings of these early releases get addressed - slowly yet relentlessly - over time. And I've known for awhile that I'm seriously remiss in having a second serious look at Microsoft's data warehousing suite.

Enter Warren Thornthwaite and Joy Mundy's terrific new book: "The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit":

The clearly written and lint-free text describes the now-mature suite of Microsoft data warehousing technologies and tools in the context of the super-powerful Ralph Kimball design techniques that are now fully recognized as best practice in the field. Warren & Joy provide expert advice in how to leverage these tools to build industrial-strength, contemporary, end-to-end business intelligence solutions.

This is another home run from the Kimball Group.

None of the tough design challenges in the Kimball Toolkit series have been glossed over, and the authors are refreshingly candid in their advice on how best to exploit the MS tools' strengths - with pragmatic advice on how best to dodge their weaknesses.

The power of Ralph's design techniques, in concert with the undeniably compelling price/performance of the MS product line, is going to be very disruptive to the data warehousing status quo. I believe that we specialists in the field have a choice: embrace this new reality, or quietly fade away. Sadly, I'm in no position to retire yet, so I choose the former. The "Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit" has actually got me excited about building my first end-to-end Microsoft data warehouse. Given my historical biases - believe me - there can be no stronger endorsement!

Congratulations to the authors for a wonderful contribution to the field.

Jim Stagnitto
Data Warehouse Architect
Llumino, Inc. (www.llumino.com)

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Grand Slam From The Kimball Group, February 10, 2006

By	JP O'Connor "Avocation: Olympic Shooting Coac... (Marietta, GA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It should come as no surprise to readers of Ralph Kimball's work that this latest offering from two members of the Kimball Group is every bit as insightful, practical, and useful as previous books in the toolkit series.

This book is not another "condensed software manual" nor is it an idealized or theoretic idea of how someone thinks a project ought to be done. Rather, this book is "roll up your sleeves, hands on, this is how to make it work in the real world" kind of material from authors who have been there and done that many times over.

Experience is a dear teacher, especially in data warehousing, and Joy, Warren, and Ralph freely share their insights. At pertinent points, they provide pointers to external references for digging deeper. An example of this are the references provided on page 411 related to image density and information display. The companion web site already has several useful tools and the collection will likely grow in the coming weeks.

While this book builds on the previous Data Warehouse Toolkit, Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit, and Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit books, it is self contained and comprehensive. The previous books provide much additional detail of course. This book takes those ideas and shows us how to implement them using Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 suite of tools.

Instead of providing a bunch of disjoint "tips" or examples, a complete project is taken from start to finish to show how the design choices and strategies - based on requirements - lead to implementation choices and techniques and how all the components are brought together in a comprehensive end result.

The book hadn't been on my desk 30 minutes before co-workers were already trying to borrow it. I think they each need to buy their own copy!