Building the Data Warehouse Description:

Building the Data Warehouse review:
1 stars (The (im)practical approach to DW design) - If you work for a large corporation which has millions of $ to spend on DW projects, maybe you should look at this book and even consider some of the ideas that it contains.

But if you need to develop a data warehouse using limited resources and within a certain timeframe, your time will better used reading other books, because following the Inmon approach will lead you to an unnecessary complicated and expensive design.

I found that the arguments used by Inmon to demonstrate the limits of the dimensional approach are not convincing at all. For example, at page 142 he says "Because there is a different data structure for each data mart, making any data mart into a data warehouse doesn't make sense."

Having personally implemented several data warehouses using the "conformed dimensions" approach, I can guarantee that it worked and produced a very elegant and clean data model.


5 stars (Everything you wanted to know about building a Data Warehouse) - An extremely well written book that not only is wide in scope but also tells the story - shows how and why the data warehouse evolved. The author details the subject thoroughly, points out the pitfalls, explains the proper methodology for success. The illustrations are terrific! This is a must have for anyone involved in Data Warehousing projects.
1 stars (Pedantic and sluggish) - I know the Inmon vs. Kimball thing has turned into something of a feud. Having owned the first and second edition of this particular book (the first edition is now more useful than ever hollowed out with a knife to hide jewelry) and having browsed through the third edition that a colleague purchased, I must say that the major change since the obscure first edition is that Inmon has now taken a much more defensive tone now that Kimball is out there presenting clear, concise and useful real-world concepts and implementation techniques and gathering followers. I also own Inmon's "Using the Data Warehouse", "Data Warehousing and the Zachman Framework", and "Exploration Warehousing" and the question that comes to mind most after reading through these books is why did I waste the money. The reading is difficult, not so much because the subject matter is difficult, but more because it seems to be dry theory and has little advice on how to actually design a real working data warehouse. When later, Kimball came out with his breakthrough book: "The Data Warehouse Toolkit", it all seemed conceptually so much simpler and straightforward.