Impossible Data Warehouse Situations

Impossible Data Warehouse Situations
by Sid Adelman & Others
Copyright 2003
Addison-Wesley

Find out more about this book, or purchase it, from Amazon.com

Data Warehousing is becoming more and more popular as organizations are finding how powerful it can be at producing the data they need to run their organizations on a day-to-day basis. Part of this popularization is due to the fact that Microsoft has included Data Warehousing capabilities  -- free -- in both SQL Server 7.0 and 2000. Although data warehousing has become much more popular, it is still an area that a lot of DBAs have yet to master.

The book, Impossible Data Warehouse Situations, is not a book specific to SQL Server, but instead focuses on generic issues that all data warehouses face. It is not a primer, but a trouble-shooting guide to common data warehouse issues where you learn how to deal with them.

The book covers 91 data warehouse issues, which are addressed by nine different data warehousing experts. Some of the issues covered include:

• Management Issues

• Changing Requirements and Objectives

• Justification and Budget

• Organization and Staffing

• User Issues

• Team Issues

• Project Planning and Scheduling

• Data Warehouse Standards

• Tools and Vendors

• Security

• Data Quality

• Integration

• Architecture

• Performance

While you might read the book from beginning to end, you may also elect to jump to the specific issue of your immediate concern. It is very easy to just read those sections of the book that are of the most interest to you.

As you may have noticed, one of the topics covered in this book is performance. It is a very high-level discussion and doesn't offer a lot of specific detail. But again, since this is not a database-specific book, this is to be expected.

I recommend this book to everyone who is contemplating building a data warehouse for your organization. As it is an intermediate-level book, you already should have a basic understanding of database warehousing before you read this one. This is also a good book for managers who need to know the major issues that their development team is facing. In many ways, this book bridges the gap between theoretical books on data warehousing and the real world.