Data Warehouse Design Solutions (Paperback)

by Christopher Adamson (Author), Michael Venerable (Author) "This book is all about answering business questions..." (more)
Key Phrases: production data warehouse, custom fact tables, interrow comparisons, Key Business Term, Fizzy Cola, Captain Coffee (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Data warehouses store millions of records, allowing managers to ask the big-picture questions about their businesses. The authors of Data Warehouse Design Solutions share their expertise in designing successful data warehouses and concentrate on understanding business processes within a variety of industries.

First, the authors outline the promise--and potential hurdles--of data warehousing. They thoroughly explain the idea of dimensional data, which is used to represent the quantities or attributes that can be queried in a data warehouse. The authors argue that data warehouses need to adapt to changing business conditions and often must be more flexible than planned. They advise building the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) as a series of interlocking data marts (which contain different dimensions). Developers can build part of a solution and add new data marts later. The result is a more adaptable approach to warehousing data.

The heart of Data Warehouse Design Solutions is the descriptions of data warehouses tailored to specific industries--sales, marketing, fulfillment, production, inventory, and capacity--using real-world businesses. The authors offer business models, sample dimensions, database schema, and sample reports for each business area.

Later chapters discuss more advanced areas for data warehousing, including budget tracking, financial reporting (and managerial accounting), and even how to look at profitability and intellectual capital. The authors round out their nuts-and-bolts tour of today's businesses with a summary of the various measures that fit each type of organization. Finally, the authors come back to theory, with some ideas on building effective systems that are fast and that generate easy-to-read reports. The last chapter argues convincingly that their incremental approach to building data warehousing has some distinct advantages. --Richard Dragan

Product Description
"Each chapter is... a practice run for the way we all ought to design our data marts and hence our data warehouses."-Ralph Kimball, from the Foreword.

Let the experts show you how to customize data warehouse designs for real business needs in Data Warehouse Design Solutions.

To effectively design a data warehouse, you have to understand its many business uses. This guidebook shows you how business managers in different corporate functions actually use data warehouses to make decisions. You'll get a rich set of data warehouse designs that flow from realistic business cases. Two top experts show you how to customize your data warehouse designs for real-life business needs including:
* Sales and marketing
* Production and inventory management
* Budgeting and financial reporting
* Quality control
* Product delivery and fulfillment
* Strategic business analysis such as determining market share, rates of return on investment, and other key analytic ratios.

CD-ROM includes

All sample data warehouse designs with accompanying preformatted reports in HTML for specific business uses such as marketing, sales, and financial analysis.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (June 29, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 047125195X
• ISBN-13: 978-0471251958
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #80,503 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good handbook on dimensional modeling, April 4, 2001

By	Konstantin Lissianski (Russia) - See all my reviews

If you do not have 'The Data Warehouse Toolkit' by Ralph Kimball yet, you may want to buy this book. The techniques and approaches discussed in these two books are almost the same. The way this book is structured is very much alike that of the Kimball's book. But I liked the fact that the chapters are dedicated to particular business areas, not particular industries. In the chapter about marketing you will find examples for three industries. I liked Chapter 13, 'Presenting Infomation' which is full of tips on effective reporting. I liked also the chapter on financial reporting which gives a technical reader basic ideas of what finance is about. You will learn about balance sheets, income statments, cost allocation from the point of view of a data modeler. Of course, the book has all the terms and techniques one has to know to successfully build dimensional models. I did not like though the last two chapters which deal with methodology questions. You will only get a slight idea about how to integrate dimensional modeling into your data warehousing project. You will have to buy one of those books on methodologies to get a better insight into the question. In general, the book is very interesting. I gave it four stars for minor flaws - no one is perfect!

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solve business issues with these DW plans, August 26, 1998

By	[e-mail] (Palo Alto, CA) - See all my reviews

The authors have written a stunning example of how to make complex issues simple for both newcomers and the experienced.

If you have no idea of what the problems are in a product or service fulfillment business or any other of a variety of industries, you can look them up here and get an overview of the problems and a simple design of a star schema that can help resolve the issues.

Invaluable for both IT types, Business Analysts and Consultants who want to get beyond the theory and into the real world.

Follows Kimball's teachings closely which makes the content even more valuable for those who use "The Data Warehouse Toolkit" as their bible.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Data warehouse data models for real business problems, October 1, 1998

By A Customer

What is great about this book is that it discusses design issues in the context of real and common business problems that data warehouses address. Most authors on data warehousing make abstract assertions about the strengths of data warehousing. This intelligent book gives the reader the material to make up his own mind as to what benefits data warehousing brings to a business.