". . . one of the definitive books of our industry. If you take the time to read only one professional book, make it this book." -W. H. Inmon

One of the most dramatic new developments in database design, the dimensional data warehouse is a powerful database model that.significantly enhances managers' ability to quickly analyze large, multidimensional data sets. Written by the leading proponent of this revolutionary new approach, this valuable book/CD toolkit outfits you with all the nuts-and-bolts information you need to design, build, manage, and use dimensional data warehouses for virtually any type of business application, as well as software for querying dimensional data warehouses.

Employing many real-life case studies of data warehouses, Ralph Kimball provides clear-cut guidelines on how to model data and design data warehouses to support advanced multidimensional decision support systems. Beginning with the relatively simple example of a data warehouse for a grocery store, he progresses, step-by-step, through an increasingly complex array of business applications in retail, manufacturing, banking, insurance, subscriptions, and airline reservations. By the end of the book, you will have mastered the full range of powerful techniques for creating, controlling, and navigating dimensional business databases that are easy to understand and navigate.

On the CD-ROM you'll find:
* Software for querying dimensional data warehouses.
* Working models of all the databases described in the book.

Average Customer Review: ( 37 customer reviews )
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I would recommend this book, to anybody who wants to practice DDW, as the first book to be read on the subject to gain most.

Because of its entirely example-based approach, the book may not be of much use in an exclusive conceptual/academic perspective.

The only omission I have noticed in this book is, it doesn't speak much about data extraction complexities. Even though Kimball dedicates a few pages towards the end of the book for this purpose, it is largely insufficient and gives no worthful advice to a practioner of data extraction process. So if you are looking for a solution to your data extract nightmare, this book is of little use.

24 of 26 found the following review helpful:

The Best choice for beginnerDec 20, 1999
By Andris Rozenbahs
This book is writen in very good language and very easy to understand. For the beginner it's the best choice, but for the advanced project manager or system analyst i will recommend other one from R. Kimball : The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit. Thanks to Ralph and to their team - it's one of the best books about DW in the market.

13 of 13 found the following review helpful:

Second Time is CharmedDec 02, 1999

A good book, but a bit tough reading, especially when you get to the examples and building of fact tables and dimensions. I would suggest reading the content and skipping the examples the first time and the read the entire book. It helped to have that understanding first. A few of my colleagues have put the book aside for lack of wanting to "Plow through" the examples. I managed to read through the book this way in a matter of a few days. It helped to clarify what pieces I was missing ans strengthened what I knew.

13 of 13 found the following review helpful:

Dimensional Modeling Made SimplerNov 26, 1999
By Martyn Richard Jones "Martyn Richard Jones"
Hello

This book will be helpful for people who are tasked with building Data Marts that could benefit from the use of dimensional modeling and can also be represented as a dimensional models.

Dimensional data models, which have been around for a very long time, have proved quite useful in a number of business decision making scenarios where decsision making power - through an intentionally limited but versatile set of information - can be made available to business users.

This book focuses on the data modelling for decision support in a Data Mart environment, and also where star schemas - intuitive data models - are used to represent business information in a business-people friendly structure and format. In this area - dimensional modeling and sophisticated use of SQL - the author is probably the best around at this moment in time.

So yes, buy this book if you need a rapid learning aide for dimensional modelling and if you want to know more about the general area of Data Warehousing and some of is best principles and practices then also go for a couple of books by Bill Inmon - the father of data warehousing.

Best regards,

Martyn R Jones iniciativa

19 of 22 found the following review helpful:

A very practicle guideMar 08, 1999

I have been working in the commercial reporting / data warehousing market for over 5 years. I have read many books on the subject, most of which deal with the higher level conceptuality of data warehousing and implementation. Since reading this book I have designed and implemented a multi-dimensional data warehouse, using most of the techniques laid out in this book, with a European manufacturing company in BD2/400 and SQL datamarts. I found this book outstanding in terms of breaking down the problems of creating a multi-dimensional data warehouse and giving a very practical analysis to implementation model. It is possible within the right company to implement a large data warehouse following the methods in this book. To complement this book I would recommend reading other books that deal with client expectation management and the use of middle ware tools to ease the actual building and management of a multi dimensional design. Also look at other design models, make sure that a multi-dimensional design fit's the client situation, there are other designs...

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