database design

Ralph and his colleagues wrote a wonderful book about Data Warehousing. Ralph's objective is to make user happy. He want's to build intuitive and user-friendly Data Warehouses with a good performance and in this book he tells us how to succeed. He guides you through the Data Warehouse process form initialize interviews to design staging area and dimension models and lots more. I found this book to be the perfect answer to bringing myself up to speed. Not too technical -- but enough information to answer all the important questions which can occur in a Data Warehouse project Easy reading as well for people who native language is not english. Just read it and lets make users happy.

By the why: I would like to recommend this book to NCR's Rob Armstrong.

I read Kimball's first book and I had trouble grasping the concepts. This time around he made it much more accessible and placed more of a general business context around it. There were so many little 'hints' or 'words of advice' that I could really relate to.

This book was so helpful we bought four copies for our warehouse team and still fight over those copies. We have adopted their project template as an informal baseline.

This belongs in every cubicle where even the discussion of a data warehouse goes on.

Sorry to say! But I'm a student specializing in Data warehousing and Ralph Kimball is certainly not getting to any point in The Lifecycle Toolkit!

1. He gives to many unstructured examples!
2. He never gets to the point!
3. Ralph restates and contradicts himself again and again!
4. He could have summarized the book in 100 pages ( but then would not have made any $$$)
5. The book might just discourage most people from Data warehousing!

And the list can go on and on!

Sorry Ralph better luck next time