Data Warehousing Books

There is absolutely nothing new in this book that I haven't read in many others. Some more money down the drain.

If you are interested in learning more about decision services and what James Taylor calls Enterprise Decision Management read his book Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions - coauthored with Neil Raden. I expected to just skim though the book since I have worked with BREs on several projects. I ended up reading this excellent book cover to cover. It's loaded with best practices and case studies as well as:

* How to automate operational decisions
* How decision services fit into SOA
* Creating a closed loop process for decision improvement
* Assessing and maturing your decision services capabilities

As SOA matures we are finding new ways to architect systems and receiving benefits from SOA in unexpected ways. How often have you seen improvement of operational decisions listed as a SOA benefit?

This was from my blog post at:

it.toolbox.com/blogs/the-soa-blog/soa-decision-services-27156

Eric Roch

Rules management really a big thing these days. It is one of the best technologies for lowering IT costs. Rules empower business users and subject matter experts to view, change and simulate change impact of rules in an enterprise. This book is packed with great ideas and a good overview of business rules management from "why rules?", rule harvesting, rule management and rule execution.

The excellent section on Rule Templates was a turning point for my cognition of how metadata registries can be used with rules engines. Conditionals can reference data elements and actions can change states of XML instances.

One of the two author's is Jim Taylor who is a VP at Fair Issac. Despite this fact the book does a pretty good job of looking at the rule process not a specific rules engine.

My only criticism with the book is it is very light on the topic of semantics, metadata registries and rules. There is a little coverage of the process of getting business users to write precise, concise definitions for business terms and the management and traceability of those definitions. A rule is only as good as the definitions for the business terms they reference. If you combine a good rules management system with an solid ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry you can get the rule precision you need. Anything less could lead to chaos when everyone uses private definitions of business terms to express duplicate rules.

Most business persons associated with the technology aspects of their firms now understand that the importance of intelligence in general to beat the competition has increased rapidly over the last couple decades. Much of the business world, however, has not been aware of this need until recently. For example, the September 15th-21st 2007 issue of the Economist magazine included an article entitled "Business by Numbers" that covered some aspects of business intelligence, but with an aura of mystery as though the reader was not yet aware of the subject matter. Just several months ago, Harvard Business School Press released the first mainstream work on competitive intelligence, which was long overdue (see my review for that work). While "Competing on Analytics" focused on introducing the reader to competitive intelligence, however, James Taylor and Neil Raden take the next step by presenting an exhaustive survey of current thoughts on business intelligence in general and how it might deliver on its promises to businesses by moving to the next step in providing automated decision making. In his Six Sigma related works, M. Daniel Sloan (see my reviews for his works) stresses the importance of evidence-based decision making that is based on data and not guesswork. The importance of using software systems to enable automated decision making is what "Smart (Enough) Systems" is all about. While chapters 1 and 2 start off slowly and are a bit academic in nature, they set the stage for the remainder of the text. Chapter 3 is incredibly well-written. It provides a history of how technology has been used in business decision making, and how data warehousing entered the picture. This chapter also provides some very well-worded discussions on what distinguishes data warehousing from business intelligence. However, the reader is repeatedly reminded throughout the book that enterprise decision management (EDM) does not just provide business data in different formats in order that business persons can interpret the information manually. EDM actually provides a large portion of these interpretations. The amount of data in software systems throughout the world is rising exponentially, and Raden and Taylor explain that this automation is necessary in order that crucial opportunities for more effective competition not be missed. Many of the decisions that need to be made with this data just cannot wait for human analysis. The next few chapters after chapter 3 expound on the earlier material, and the rest of the text explains the various ways that EDM might be adopted by businesses. Unlike "Competing on Analytics", the material in the latter half of "Smart (Enough) Systems" is not lightweight and cannot be read in an afternoon. Davenport and Harris explain very well the "what", but Raden and Taylor stress the "how". Both the content and the number of graphs and diagrams that Raden and Taylor provide are excellent and accompany the material well. Updated information on various topics that I have not seen elsewhere are also included in the book, such as Figure 10.11 which depicts how industry software project failures have dropped over time, but the portion of these failures due to requirements errors has remained consistent. In addition, side bars throughout the book present case studies that explain how the EDM way contrasts with the old way of doing things, and the benefits provided by EDM in these scenarios. I do not expect this seminal work by Raden and Taylor to sit on bookshelves but to be actively referenced by its readership.

Smart Enough Systems is a book with one foot in two worlds. At one level, it is a business book addressing the issues of using information and decision support. On the other level it is almost a BI/DSS for the less intelligent in terms of its step by step guidance on working through these issues. Fortunately the books premise regarding automating hidden decisions requires a bit of both.

As a business book, Smart Enough covers the need to explain the concepts in business terms and provide a framework for generating ROI. It does not talk in great depth about how decisions drive competitive advantage. It is also a little weak on the explanation of where to apply this technique as I doubt enterprises will make the funding available to automate all of their decisions.

As a technology book, the author focuses on Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) is the primary focus of this book and it is described as applying a services approach to decision making. This looks to take business rules out of IT systems and put them into something akin to a decision service broker/service so the same situations are handled with the same set of rules.

The book is a solid and complete explanation of the author's ideas. Taylor and Raden focus on the systems aspects of EDM and their automation. This leads into a discussion of decision types and how they are automated. Here Taylor and Raden do well to illustrate these concepts, although the reader often encounters graphics and statements that are more than a bit dated.

The book would have been greatly helped with a clear and consistent case study application of its concepts. It also would have benefited from understanding the nature of decision systems support (DSS) a discipline that has been around for more than 30 years which is only discussed in a single sentence and again from a technology perspective.

This is a solid book by a professional who certainly understands the technical implications of his ideas - enterprise decision management. However, by trying to stand in both worlds it excels in neither. I would recommend this book more as a technical and implementation guide rather than as an executive business book. In that regard it has a place in IT but probably not in the Boardroom.

this book is a very completed and updated quick look to database world and optimal reference book for sql/mySQL primer.
Stefano Gallozzi

Learning MySQL (Learning)

Get this book! This O'Reilly book "Learning MySQL" first appeared in the book stores at the beginning of the year 2007. The book is written by two PhD authors who seem to have thoroughly tried its contents on their students, at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. You can buy this book and then create a splendid software career for yourself, programming Relational Databases. And live happily ever after.

If you are a total SQL beginner, please also buy a more simple-minded introductory SQL text as well; make you favorite pick among the 20-odd SQL texts available in your local bookstore, or read Amazon's reviews associated with all the other SQL books.

Now back to "Learning MySQL". I'm enjoying this book wherever I go, inserting my USB flash drive on any Windows machine I can lay my hands on. I have installed my free copy of MySQL on this low-cost device ($20 for a 4 GigB flash drive), together with Java, Apache Tomcat, FireFox, and other opensource goodies. My point is that this MySQL book covers Windows as well as it deals with Linux and Mac OS X, almost always in the same breath.

I typically try out the book's examples at the mysql> command prompt, but my own final application right now happens to consist of Java servlets, talking to MySQL databases, and running in Tomcat under the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), all on the puny USB flash drive without disturbing the particular Windows machine I'm visiting.

By following the book's examples I have built up a mental toolbox containing all the standard SQL techniques and all the helpful but proprietary MySQL extensions to SQL. Extensions which you might, or might not, want to assimilate, depending on your purity point of view.

As you go through the book's examples on your own mysql> command line, you realize that each example probably in an explanation triggered by questions from the authors' bright MySQL students. It is like sitting in their classroom lapping up the authours' knowledge. And, these authors know their stuff, something that cannot always be said of other SQL books.

One feature, among others in the book, is the authors' short but wonderful Chapter 4, where the reader is led by the hand through The Entity Relationship Model, and through the authors' database examples illustrating the super-important topic of How to map Entities and Relationships to Database Tables. There, the authors also point out existing tools to draw ER diagrams, such as the good free tool "Dia", or MySQL's own free "MySQL Workbench program" which is a very powerful visual database design tool, although still in the beta testing phase.

One last, but not least, comment. It appears that the book is extremely well suited to those Perl or PHP lovers, who want to get their MySQL teeth sharpened. But this reviewer is not into Perl nor PHP, yet, so don't take my word for it.

That's a good book, not for advanced SQL programmers though.
Easy to understand with great examples. I would recommend this book if you are starting to learn MySQL or are a intermediate programmer and needs a good database like MySQL. This book can be a reference for your studies. If I had this book before I could spent less time learning MySQL. But I probably would not recommend for heavy advanced SQL users, since the book have an overall idea of the SQL commands and some linux/php/database coding. Digg in!

This book is great. The text doesn't assume you have any advanced knowledge of anything. This is actually my second MySQL book. The first book didn't explain how to install and setup MySQL and then it didn't explain how to use the keyline MySQL monitor. So I was stuck after the first chapter.

"Learning MySQL" was a real life saver. You're given actual examples to follow along with and they actually explain what's going on.
Thank you sooooo much... I'm already using my new found MySQL knowledge at my job and now the book serves as a great resource for my new projects.

The first twelve chapters of "Learning MySQL" appear to be a textbook written in the mid-1990s for teaching MySQL to college students. Chapter 13 appears to have been added in 1999, about using MySQL with PHP to build websites. The first twelve chapters require using a terminal or command line (shell) interface to MySQL. My hosting service no longer supports command line interfaces, you're required to use PHPmyAdmin, which is faster and easier. Without access to a command line interface I couldn't do the exercises in the first twelve chapters; without understanding the first twelve chapters you can't figure out chapter 13. Chapter 13 teaches the PHP mysql extensions, which were superseded in 2004 by the mysqli ("i" for "improved") extensions. So the book is two generations out of date. Chapter 14 is about using Perl with PHP -- has anyone built a website with Perl in the last five years? There are other annoyances, such as you're taught to read data out of your database before you're taught to insert data into your database. After flipping back and forth between sections trying to find missing information I gave up. It's hard to believe that O'Reilly published this dinosaur in 2006. I recommend instead "Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional," by W. Jason Gilmore.

I haven't got to go deep into the book yet but what I saw was pretty good contect but it's not a beginner book.

It's the only Oracle book I seem to need. Great explanations. Includes new Oracle features. One of the best descriptions on inner, outer, left, right joins. Saved my tail a couple of times. It includes just the right amount of information.

The book does a nice job of dissecting the syntax of SELECT statements and their various components, but in my opinion would fall short for most practical users. The examples are closer to what you might find in one of those "SQL for Smarties" books than what a normal developer writing applications that interface with Oracle databases might be looking to master. For example, there isn't in depth coverage of flow-of-control mechanisms and only a few pages in the first chapter covering DML operations.

The goal of the authors is to explain how to write good readable SQL queries in Oracle 10g. The book starts with how to construct SELECT statements to group, filter and format result sets for dates, reports and data analysis. Then it proceeds to cover Oracle-specific queries and functions for hierarchies (data in tree structures), object-oriented types, XML documents, regular expressions and models (spreadsheet-like objects). Where relevant, there are notes about the differences between SQL for Oracle 10, Oracle 9 and the ANSI standard.

As expected from the title, the chapters using declarative programming (i.e. SQL queries) for relational data, hierarchical data and reports are the most comprehensive. Chapters on interfacing Oracle SQL with other technologies such as scripting (Oracle's PL/SQL), object-oriented types, XML and regular expressions, or on optimization, are brief but sufficient to get you started, especially if you have a existing background in those technologies.

This is the 2nd edition, so it's not surprising that the scope of the book is well-defined and that the writing is easy to read and polished. The example data and queries are just complex enough to demonstrate the issues without obscuring the main points. Minor annoyance about Chapter 15, "SQL Best Practices", which does not explain how to use the query analyzer and bind variables.

I was already familiar with basic Oracle SQL but didn't really understand the language; this book blew away many of the fuzzy concepts in my mind and provided me the framework to tackle more complex problems.

Kam-Hung Soh, 21 May 2007.
[...]

I'm no SDE, but I had a need to learn enough SQL to enable me to hit my company's Data Warehouse tables directly and employ some complex joins. This was the book recommended to me, and it did the trick. I sat down and began reading it and was quickly writing increasingly complex queries. I found the explanations easy to follow, and the format intuitive. The only fault I found is that there is a lack of more complex join examples, as when there are more than one field being joined on or more than two tables being joined.

I've only had this book a short time and have found more useful tips in this short book than in most of my other reference books. If you are proficient in Access, This is a must have!

I've enjoyed several other Hacks titles - Excel and Word particularly. This one is not quite the same; it's like a combination of interface and SQL hacks. Granted, there are many useful tips and ideas for code - not always bulletproof as another user mentioned, but if you know what to do you'll be able to apply these ideas.

A lot of SQL-based hacks are self-evident to someone who has a solid SQL background; some interface features (such as user system tables, etc) are interesting ideas, but one might wish there were more of them. For instance, there are at least three examples of UNION statement in a query to concatenate SELECT statements... one would think this could be fitted into a single hack.

Most of the form hacks assume that bound forms are being used, so if you populate controls programmatically (DAO or ADO recordsets) much of this won't be applicable. Form design is an important topic, but very few control properties are covered. Multi-user section is pretty pointless - if you work with multi-user access applications, you probably already know most of this.

Certain hacks are duplicated; for instance, the one regarding "cleaner criteria" has basically two identical hacks back to back. Besides that and the UNION statement, there are a few other redundant hacks, retold by different authors.

On the bright side, there are several good ideas, or at least interesting ones that open some doors to making your own hacks. There are some user-interface ideas that are valuable (like the one that highlights the active control). All in all, I do read this book, but use only about 20-30% of it, of which a good deal I either knew already or could figure out on my own.

I rate this two stars, rather than one, because it's likely that most people will find something in the book which will put them onto a new way of doing something.

Unfortunately, the book (which includes "hacks" from seven contributors, as well as the principal author) is wildly uneven in quality. The poor quality varies from the text (it is noted that hack #9 is not an "eloquent" way of handling the problem) to the solutions presented. For instance, the example code in hack #22 turns off warnings -- but then never turns them back on, which could be rather disastrous (not to mention that any code which sets warnings FALSE absolutely needs an error handling routine which ensures these are turned back on). Hack #74, rated medium hard, introduces domain aggregate functions (DSum, DLookup, etc.), but the example code doesn't protect against situations when nothing matches the Where criteria -- so the example code will blow up if the DSum function returns NULL and tries to assign that to the Single variable. Examples relying implicitly on unnormalized tables abound. Would it have been so hard to think up examples that actually used normalized tables? Hack #19, rated medium hard, provides code to move through an overly-long form relying on SendKeys (!) to simulate PageUp and PageDown key presses. Rather than insert page breaks on the form and buttons relying on SendKeys on maneuver between these, why not just transform the long form into tabs on a tab control?

The above is illustrative, rather than an exhaustive list of hacks that are trivial, dumb or even dangerous. While there certainly are some hacks in the book which gave me food for thought, problems like the above which I could detect in other hacks made me wonder what I'll find out the hard way as I try to actually use these new ideas.

If you're new to Access/VBA development, this book will be a good reference. If you've been developing Access apps for a few years, there's not much in here you haven't already figured out for yourself.

This is a fine set of 100 tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of Access. It's a good combination of simple tricks, and more advanced coding hacks. Involving everything for networks, to XML, to data crunching ideas. Even if you don't find exactly what you are looking for in terms of a solution you will benefit from seeing how the author approaches the problems.

Look through the table of contents, if you find ten or twenty that are in your areas of Access pain then

I read this book a couple of years ago, then found it useful again recently when my work re-involves building data warehouses. This book has clear coverage on many topics in database and data warehouse. Authors often include descriptions of technologies as well as the motivation of using such technologies.

This is not a book that walks you step by step to implementations, but it is a book that will help you understand the technologies. Step by step guides are product specific, and extremely lacking in this area.

If new to the domain of Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing, this book will provide a better than average job of arming you with enough technical information to make you dangerous in your "new territory". However, if you're seeking more depth in any of the title's areas or are looking for something "less-technical" (e.g., more of a business justification), other books would serve as a better reference. Nonetheless, for its broad coverage, this book is a good addition to any BI/DW practitioner's technical library.

This book is not a common Data Mining/Data Warehousing book. It has the objective of being a complete handbook, and it is successful in its aim. It gives the readers a good background that helps in answering the common questions a practitioner has. To summarise: the authors of the book managed to describe the whole subject area, that is not so easy to find in other books on these topics. To achieve that knowledge we should read many other publications from different areas.

If you are an IT professional with a good breadth of knowledge about the structure of enterprise data, systems and statistics, yet you are not sure what Data Warehousing, Data Mining or OLAP are, and are not even sure you know how to spell them, then this book is for you. (Rather limited audience if you ask me)

For the technically savvy, this book is excellent in covering, in minute detail, all of the possible needs, uses and commercial systems/products available to do Data Warehousing, Data Mining and/or OLAP. The tremendous amount of possibilities naturally causes this volume to lack the depth to actually guide a reader to an understanding of how they can implement these concepts. I do complement the author in possessing/researching such a tremendous amount of material. A downside is the fact that this book is instantly outdated because it is describing current technology (As of the writing of this book).

For non-technical Management and Executives however, this book will likely only confuse you to death and cause you to frown vehemently at the next person who recommends a Data Warehousing or OLAP strategy for your organization.

If you fit the profile that should read this book however, this is a great primer/eye opener to a rather large subject area called Enterprise Intelligence. Break out your reading glasses, (the print is small) set aside a good chunk of time, (the book is huge) and read it. Then find the suitable follow-up books that are in line with your new interests with Enterprise Intelligence. Keep a narrow focus when picking one of these. If you are a manager or executive, hire a team. This is a lot of stuff, and the need for this stuff is so painfully apparent that your business can not wait 4 years for you to learn this stuff.

As some one who makes a living doing OLAP development, I thought the Author does a great job explaining the similarities and differences between OLAP and relational analysis. An emphasis is DW and DM was obviously present. So not the best OLAP book but maybe the best (or one of) in total architecture.

Overall this is a decent introduction to SAP Business Warehouse. However, one of the biggest flaws of the book is that trys to overview two different versions. It would be much better if it simply stuck with reviewing against one version of SAP BW (preferably the most recent). It makes some of the concepts and movement through the BW interface very confusing because of the way it switchs back and forth between the two versions.

The content on the accompanying CD is really useless. Nothing of any good informative nature. The best way to read the book is to skim through the first dozen chapters to get a feel for the environment, and then read the last chapters in depth for a good understanding of how to model in SAP BW.

As a BW consultant, I found the content to be untimely (mostly based on version 1.2B) and incomplete. I purchased this book when it first came out hoping for a resource that was more comprehensive and insightful. What I found was what appeared to be a collection of disconnected "whitepapers". In short, the need for a comprehensive 'How-to' guide to BW remains unfulfilled.

I agree with many of the otehr reviewers out there: there's no real cookbook for BW, and this one complicates matters by trying to cover two versions at once. But for me, it's proven to be a great book because it doesn't assume I'm an expert. As a new member of an existing BW Support team, I don't have to ask as many "stupid" questions now that I has this. And I got a great price on a used copy!

There are so few BW books out there so one has to kind of hope for the best on this one. As a Basis team member, this is a great referece book. It needs an update however to accomodate the 2.0b and higher features more thoughly. There is some good performance information but still leaves you wanting much more in the way of BW statistics. Again, its very good for explanations of concepts, overviews, and general reference. The TABW90 class should give this book as a freebie with the course.

The book is outdated and based on BW 1.2B.

This book was very help for explaining the importance of data warehouse by functional users for business intelligence purposes. The book is laid-out in a systematic fashion that allows a non-technical person the ability to understand the process of building a data warehouse and the "technical" aspects of one. While technical terms are used through the book, the terms are defined in non-technical terms with at useful glossary at the end of each chapter for any new terms introduced in the chapter. The use of a detailed case study provides that reader with the ability to tie the "theory" with the "application" of a data warehouse. Also, the graphs and charts add in the explanation of many key ideas and issues with a data warehouse.

The only shortcoming of the book is that it does not address in any great detail how applications such as activity-based costing or balanced scorecard can use the data for analytical analysis.

This is the one book that will explain to you what data warehouse design is all about. Many books have been written on relational database design. Many other books have been written on data mining. And so many others on data warehouse design. Yet data warehouse has been so little understood. It may be because there are too many good books on relational databases and not so many good ones in data warehouse. With this one book the scenario may change. Finally people will not have any more excuse to say that they do not understand what a good data warehouse should be like. And, most importantly, how much it differs from the well-known relational databases.

What this book offers is perspectives on designing warehouses with the goal of "business intelligence". Particularly useful is an interview process of extracting requirements from the end users, business strategists, upper management, and IT support people. Giovinazzo, also introduces the topology of multidimensional databases (e.g cubes, stars, and snowflakes) and the use of "fact" tables to tie these dimensions together. Through the use of the "Big Brother and the Building Company" example, he provides some down to earth examples. In a few appendices he introduces spatially enabled warehousing (weakly), metadata standards and good tips and tips on extraction, transformation, and loading. These alone are not "minor subjects", but warrant the introduction given here (and subsequent books). The books title includes "object oriented" but is perhaps not emphasized enough. I think the real value is getting the designer to think about the needs and dimensions early in the process.

Dear Mr. Giovinazzo, Your book as a primer is OK, but you could have done better! We skip the firs quick chapters on project management and the last ones on various minor subjects. The beginner has plenty of it in the ever growing Inmonian sub-literature. What a beginner needs is a good well cut problem ad its solution. You come up with two nice examples and work on them, discussing the main aspects of dwh design. From pages 92 to 232 you address some interesting problems and suggest the relative solutions. Unfortunately there seem to be some editing mistake here and there. For example text and picture don't match at page 182 and I would't recommend using dimension type 2 at page 164. It's just type 5 without user code and it's useless. Keep up the good work.

Roberto Botto, Rome - Italy

Mr. Giovinazzo, titling this book Object Oriented Data Warehouse Design is quit a stretch. True it does contain the Object Oriented buzzwords, but no real practical OO design or implementation information. A better title would have been 'Introduction to Data Warehousing' but then this would just be remake of a hundred other books already available on that subject.

I don't use this book a lot, but have found it to be worthwhile. It's a good read when riding the bus because I can always pick up a tip or two.

Useful - but I would say costs too much for its content.
Anyone can make their own reference book similar to or better than this using TOAD's Help features!

Helped me learn a new tool for easier SQL verification of Oracle update scripts for my work!

As in most of the O'Reilly pocket paperbacks, this one is a wonderful resource. If you need a quick check of something you don't recall the details, this will probably assist you admirably. It requires you be knowleable of Toad. If you are looking for something to instruct you in the use of Toad, you may want a more substancial book. This one includes some tips and tricks that should prove beneficial to most experienced Toad users. As a quick reference the layout is good and the table of contents makes it easy to find what you need. There is not alot of meat on these bones, but the meat is pretty good. For more in depth explainations you may want to look at the Toad Handbook by Bert Scalzo and Dan Hotka.

I've used TOAD awhile now and saw there were 2 books coming out on it - this on and the TOAD handbook. This little reference is excellent. Great that it just happened to be written on the version I'm using now - 7.4. The book however is based on TOAD's core functionality and not really so much on new features. Just skimming through I came across some features I hadn't even used.

It's does touch on the optional add-ins you can get for TOAD (if you get the commericial version) like the DBA module. It had plenty for me on the debugger. If you're looking for a tutorial, this isn't it, though it does remind you about looking in the docs folder for TOAD documentation in PDF. This little guide is a great reference.

I see some poor ratings for this book. If you want a reference to ADO MD and DSO or a how-to program step-by-step, buy another book and specify how you tried to use the book in your review. In reading the reviews I almost did not buy this book, luckily I was in a hurry when I ordered and left it in my basket.

My responsibility is to assist clients in their implementation of OLAP solutions. I recommend the purchase of this book to all of my clients since I have read it. If you want to hand just one book to any computer professional who does not know OLAP, this has got to be it. Advanced Analysis Server knowledge will come from time and experience, but all of the fundamentals (DTS, Data Warehousing, Schema Types and implementation, performance issues, .mdx language basics, DSO basics and the use of .mdx in Excel) are all there, easily understandable and will provide a foundation for future growth. I strongly recommend this book, and the only reason I give it a 4/5 is because it suggests it will help you build an OLAP application, however it only introduces you to the concepts of application development for OLAP.

I read this book and the Wrox book on MS OLAP. The two books seem to complement each other with some overlaps of course. While this book has many good exmaples on DTS, MDX, and client access to OLAP data, the Wrox book is more organized and has better discussions of OLAP cubes and other aspects of DW as well as a better coverage of MDX. Maybe it is crazy, but it would have been a good idea if the authors of both books combined their efforts and produced one book (wishful thinking).

I was pretty disappointed with the material in this book. It was basically a re-hash of the microsoft documentation and it doesn't go into any depth.

Admittedly not the most strightforward subject matter, but this book has too many serious problems. Errors in the code examples, code fragments that don't represent one complete task, etc. OK if you want a high level overview, but a code reference- NO WAY.

Covering the whole Data Warehousing process: Data Transformation, Creating Cubes, and the Olap front-end tools, this book explains all this subjects in a straight and clear way. The authors have a practical approach. The controversial issues are mentioned and soon pointed to other reference books, but they allways show their favourite solutions and the reasons driving them. It's a real and useful handbook for building Data Warehouse using Microsoft tools.

Ok, I am a known heretic. I am not impressed by the CWM model. It is oriented toward the object-oriented implementation of a tool for metadata exchange, not toward representing the things business people would be looking for in a meta data repository.

This book is better than the on-line specification at describing the model--which was really incomprehensible--but this is at the expense of completeness. Definitions are not available for all classes and the ones that are are not clear (to me at least). The relationships are barely defined at all.

In fairness, the model is so complex that it may not be possible to describe clearly to anyone not deeply immersed in the language of object-orientation. The team of authors is further hampered by its use of UML. The notation does not permit a complete inheritance tree to be portrayed in a diagram if the diagram is of less than the entire model. Two classes may be related, but you can't see this because the relationship is between great grandparents, shown on a different page.

The overall organization of the book: its introduction of topics, clear and concise definitions and illustrative examples made for easy reading, even for concepts with which I was unfamiliar. The structure, content and motivation for the CWM classes and packages were clearly presented as was their use, interaction, extensibility and applicability through thoughtfully constructed examples.

A must read for managers, system architects and software developers grappling with data warehouse integration projects.

I can't believe the previous reviewer. He basically said he didn't like CWM or UML, therefore the book is obviously bad ?!?

The project I am just starting is a large data mining effort that will be integrating multiple data warehouse and data mining tools. I knew we needed CWM from some earlier work with metadata repositories, but did not have the energy to dig into the OMG specification. This book gave me exactly the overview I was looking for; as an earlier author said, "This book covers all the practical steps for planning, implementing, and deploying CWM technologies". I would like to give it at least 7 stars to average out the previous irrelevant review...

By far, the finest presentation of a new (to me) concept I have seen in a long time. Structure of book is ideal, with a strong writing style, fantastic use of graphics, and examples that aid in understanding. I knew virtually nothing about CWM before reading this book -- I know a good deal now. Excellent, understandable writing style combined with superb technical information...a definite "stew" for the CWM-hungry mind. Bon appetit!

I'll say at the start that this is not my kind of book. I prefer books which are useful, enlightening or both. This didn't seem to be either. From page 3: "The mission of this book is to provide a single, coherent, and comprehensive overview of the OMG's Common Warehouse Metamodel, which is easy to read.". It may be slightly easier to read than the raw specification, but it's a lot less useful. The most telling point is further down the same page where it admits to really being just an introduction to a forthcoming "Warehouse Metamodel Developers Guide".

For an overview, the book is really short on examples. It's got lots of vague UML diagrams and pretty pictures like you might see on a powerpoint slide, but not a single worked example to show how all the buzzwords and technologies might actually fit together. I also have great problems with their use of UML as a language to actually specify data models, processes and so on. For me UML is a tool to help express intentions to people, not supply details to processing software, but this book seems to ignore the difference.

If you know nothing about meta-modelling, and want the sort of information you can get from the slides of a conference presentation, this may be a useful book. If you want to understand the details, or (gosh) actually get a job done, then this book will just frustrate you.