Building the Data Warehouse

The new edition of the classic bestseller that launched the data warehousing industry covers new approaches and technologies, many of which have been pioneered by Inmon himself In addition to explaining the fundamentals of data warehouse systems, the book covers new topics such as methods for handling unstructured data in a data warehouse and storing data across multiple storage media Discusses the pros and cons of relational versus multidimensional design and how to measure return on investment in planning data warehouse projects Covers advanced topics, including data monitoring and testing Although the book includes an extra 100 pages worth of valuable content, the price has actually been reduced from $65 to $55

User review
Provides basic generic advice
As other reviers have mentioned, this book covers wide, but not that deep. Like many books, it gives advice so generic as to be useless, but an easy to understand overview has its importance too, so perhaps this is a good place to start.

So you will see the basic problems of combining data from different sources into one place, but not necessarily how to do it. Very little is dedicated to the issues around moving that data or ETL.

This book has many chapters, many of which may not apply to your situation.

User review
Good and Bad
This book is a good introduction to data warehousing. However, the style is remarkably bad. It is very repetitious, poorly organized overall, occasionally self-contradictory, and jam-packed with cartoon-like line drawings that seldom add clarity to the discussion. The book easily could be reduced from 500 pages to 200 pages without losing any information, and with an improvement in readability.

User review
BI for smarties
In my opinion Kimball vs Inmon is not a war of religion, they both have pro and cons in different situation. I believe people seriously interested in BI should read the book and take several advices from it. There are situation in which an Inmon design is good, there are some in which it isn't BUT to be able to judge you need to know both an be able to decide based on the customer's necessity.
The pictures in the book are really ugly and useless, nevertheless the concepts are clearly stated and easily understandable. If I have to say something wrong about it is that you need to already know what a BI system is in order to get the most out of the book. It is not for newcomers but it is definetely a good book on BI.

User review
Review of Data Warehouse Tools
Received in a timely manner, in good condition, and it is very useful. Thx.

User review
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.