| | |  | Software Engineering | Home » » » The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | A thorough update to the industry standard for designing, developing, and deploying data warehouse and business intelligence systemsThe world of data warehousing has changed remarkably since the first edition of The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit was published in 1998. In that time, the data warehouse industry has reached full maturity and acceptance, hardware and software have made staggering advances, and the techniques promoted in the premiere edition of this book have been adopted by nearly all data warehouse vendors and practitioners. In addition, the term "business intelligence" emerged to reflect the mission of the data warehouse: wrangling the data out of source systems, cleaning it, and delivering it to add value to the business. Ralph Kimball and his colleagues have refined the original set of Lifecycle methods and techniques based on their consulting and training experience. The authors understand first-hand that a data warehousing/business intelligence (DW/BI) system needs to change as fast as its surrounding organization evolves. To that end, they walk you through the detailed steps of designing, developing, and deploying a DW/BI system. You'll learn to create adaptable systems that deliver data and analyses to business users so they can make better business decisions. With substantial new and updated content, this second edition of The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit again sets the standard in data warehousing for the next decade. It shows you how to: - Identify and prioritize data warehouse opportunities
- Create an architecture plan and select products
- Design a powerful, flexible, dimensional model
- Build a robust ETL system
- Develop BI applications to deliver data to business users
- Deploy and sustain a healthy DW/BI environment
The authors are members of the Kimball Group. Each has focused on data warehousing and business intelligence consulting and education for more than 15 years; most have written other books in the Toolkit series. Learn more about the Kimball Group and Kimball University at www.kimballgroup.com. This book is also available as part of the Kimball's Data Warehouse Toolkit Classics Box Set (ISBN: 9780470479575) with the following 3 books: - The Data Warehouse Toolkit, 2nd Edition (9780471200246)
- The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit, 2nd Edition (9780470149775)
- The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit (9780764567575)
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Ralph Kimball | | Paperback:
| 672 pages | | Publisher:
| Wiley | | Publication Date:
| January 10, 2008 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0470149779 | | Product Length:
| 9.28 inches | | Product Width:
| 7.33 inches | | Product Height:
| 1.46 inches | | Product Weight:
| 2.11 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.06 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.4 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.5 inches | | Package Weight:
| 2.16 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 58 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 58 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
121 of 121 found the following review helpful:
 Everything you ever wanted to know about DW ....Sep 30, 1999
but were afraid to ask. This is the definitive book on the DW lifecycle. After having worked on two not-so-perfect data warehousing projects, I found myself on more than one occasion seeing in print many of the ideas that I have either arrived at by trial and error or had a hunch were the right way to go. I would have given this book five stars, except for one thing: you really need to have read Kimball's first book, The Data Warehouse Toolkit, to get the proper foundation for reading the DW Lifecylcle Toolkit. I bought the DW Lifecycle Toolkit first thinking that I could jump right ahead. Not so. Much to my chagrin, I ended up buying the DW Toolkit and reading it first. These books really should be offered with the option to be purchased together. That way, the reader will know up front that both books are a must read.
29 of 31 found the following review helpful:
Good book, but could've been betterMay 20, 1999
Not enough examples....they keep referring to other books. The book would've been awesome if it had more examples (specially designing star schema models and aggregations). I don't like to spend $40-50 each on two books just to get the examples and lot of the repeat information. The book companies and the authors are making more money by doing this, but they're not winning fans (Wiley books and Kimball)
27 of 29 found the following review helpful:
 This is clearly the BEST Data Warehouse book I've read!!May 18, 1999
Our organization has implemented a very successful Data Warehouse, due largely to following the design and deployment principles from Dr. Kimball's two textbooks. The key to a successful Data Warehouse is providing all business users an easy to use and high performance queryable system. The dimensional design is, without a doubt, the defacto standard for Queryable Data Warehouses, and the author does a superb job motivating its use and explaining how to develop your integrated, dimensional data warehouse. In addition, the author gives valuable advice on many, many other aspects of the process, such as assessing your readiness for proceeding with a warehouse effort. This book is a "must read" for anyone involved in a Data Warehouse project. You will have an excellent chance of succeeding with even a most complicated Data Warehouse System if you follow the wisdom in this book.
18 of 19 found the following review helpful:
Very good, but not a one-stop shop for Data ModellersMar 05, 2003
PROS
- Offers invaluable advice based on the authors' experience so that you don't need to re-invent the wheel or make the same mistakes they made (and subsequently learned from).
- Most useful for Project Managers/DBAs; less so for Data Modellers.CONS
- I purchased this book on the assumption that it offered a comprehensive treatment of all stages of the Data Warehouse project lifecycle (as the cover would lead you to believe). However, it does not offer a comprehensive treatment of Dimensional Modelling. For this, the book actually assumes you have read Kimball's former book - "The Data Warehouse Toolkit - The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling" (which provides a full treatment and practical examples for several industry sectors).
- I did not like the writing-style. If the authors would have omitted all text like "we believe.." and "in our experience..." I'm sure the book wouldn't have used 800 pages. CONCLUSION
This book has remained by my side throughout the project lifecycle, giving great guidance and pointers to help manage the project optimally.
However, if you are responsible for Data Modelling, you will also need to buy "The Data Warehouse Toolkit", thereby doubling the overall cost.
13 of 13 found the following review helpful:
This book makes building a Data Warehouse Possible!Feb 19, 1999
We were at a lose on how to proceed with putting together an historical database that would track 10,000 discrete survey items from over 800 surveys per year, including survey indications, and official estimates. The real problem was doing it such a way as to make it easy to use, understandable, and accessible to all of our data analysts. We read Inmon's book and decided it would be too complicated and slow if we used his approach. Besides, we wanted true ad-hoc capabilities, and did not want to be hampered by a system that had too little data, or was being controled by someone trying to save nickles on DASD by spending dollars of our time. Kimball's book gave us what we were looking for: a way to build a data warehouse incrementally, using and tracking the lowest level of granularity in our data, and offering simplicity and service without an army of IT consultants. His engineering approach to dimensional modeling, particularly his notion of conforming dimensions puts the traditionalists, like Inmon, out to pasture.
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