A Manager's Guide to Data Warehousing

A Manager's Guide to Data Warehousing
| 2009-05-26 00:00:00 | | 0 | Data Warehouse


Aimed at helping business and IT managers clearly communicate with each other, this helpful book addresses concerns straight-on and provides practical methods to building a collaborative data warehouse . You?ll get clear explanations of the goals and objectives of each stage of the data warehouse lifecycle while learning the roles that both business managers and technicians play at each stage. Discussions of the most critical decision points for success at each phase of the data warehouse lifecycle help you understand ways in which both business and IT management can make decisions that best meet unified objectives.

User review
This Book Does What it Claims
This book was written for the non-technical professional who either wants or needs to learn about data warehousing. The book will give her the basics of data warehousing in a step by step fashion, describing what's involved in creating a data warehouse and how you deliver the data when it's needed. That's a mouthful. The book wasn't easy for me to go through, but I believe it does what it claims. I do now have a grasp of what data warehousing all about and most importantly I've learned what I needed to know, that it's not a field for me. Had it not been for this book I might have spent endless hours learning the field, only to find out it would have been work that I wouldn't have been happy doing. Thanks to this book I've reconsidered two classes I was going to take, so it deserves five stars, because it's really been a benefit to me.

User review
Dry as dust, but has useful information
Data (information) is the base of all organizations, from small to large. Organizing data is a challenge and always has been. What has changed is that the technology now allows not only for the accumulation of more data, but makes keeping it easier and less expensive. Government regulations, insurance requirements and other factors make it mandatory to retain some information for varying periods while some information is best disposed of as quickly as possible to avoid or mitigate legal liability. People working on the tech side of the organization usually know little of the present or potential value of the data they are responsible for managing, while manager typically know little of how the technology might make delivery of vital information more efficient and put the information into easily usable form.


Enter the `data warehouse`. Not long ago, it was a buzzword, but as the hype died down, some people truly got the idea of what a data warehouse is and how it can be used. Author Laura Reeves appears to be one of them. In one of the clearest sentences in her book, she says `the purpose and characteristics of a data warehousing environment are to provide data in a format easily understood by the business community in order to support decision-making processes. The data warehouse supports looking at the business data over time to identify significant trends in buying behavior, customer retention, or changes in employee productivity.`


The dry as dust tone of the above carries through the entire book. It is eye-wearying stuff, but much of the information Reeves conveys will be useful for the non-technical business manager trying to get a grasp of the data warehouse concept. A lot of it is also hooey, such as the fake case histories with lines like this classic: `The project tea members all work hard to keep the project moving forward in a timely manner, and often this happens without the direct intervention from the sponsor.` This corporate silly talk takes up way too much space: this book could easily have been two-thirds the size without surrendering any vital information.


Overall, Reeves stays in descriptive mode, describing how a model project might flow, how appropriate information might be collected and so on. There is very little specificity within these more than 400 pages. On the other hand, business managers typically don't prosper in the detail rich environment a technical person demands.


My impression is that this is information presented in a manner executives seek out at seminars presented at 5-star resorts billed as training sessions.


This is a good book, in general, for people who need to comprehend from a level of zero practical knowledge what data warehousing is about. The more intelligent reader may find Reeves' presentation irritating. It is bone-dry and presumes the reader has little intelligence. But the book does provide useful information on the subject and that is what counts in the final analysis.


Jerry



User review
Non-Technical Guide
The target audience is the non-technical manger who has identified a potential benefit to consolidating corporate data and needs to understand the risks, cost and benefits more fully. It covers the various roles and responsibilities for the project and the operational differences between an OLTP and DW requirements. It would have useful to have more discussion of dynamic provisioning, data retention and archiving.

User review
non-trivial
One take home message emphasised by the book is that data warehousing is not cheap and not easy to implement. Why so is explained at length in the text. A key idea is that your company has to invest many resources, not least in educating key people in the organisation. The book is written for a non-technical manager, who probably has to supervise technical IT personnel.


Chapter 7, on modelling of data, is rudimentary. A person from a database background would find the discussion trivial. It is more so that the manager can try a top level modelling of a business situation for herself. Where this is then passed to her technical staff for a more detailed exposition. Another scenario is to get enough background about the ideas of making models so that she can understand those pushed up to her from the staff.


Business intelligence is covered here in generalities. One slightly frustrating aspect is that if you want some specific details about a non-trivial case, that the book never quite puts these forth. This is not confined to this book. It appears that involved real world cases of BI might be still held tightly inside companies; no one is willing to expose a case study for everyone else to study.


Chapter 3 has a table of vendors that can provide different parts of an inventory software application. SAS and Informatica are 2 such vendors. Useful if you need to delve further into actual commercial offerings.

User review
Good but,,.
I bought this book after reading chapter 1.

Both chapter 1 - 3 are good readings but the remaining chapters are not fantastic.


I have read the entire Wiley-Ralph Kimball series, perhaps that's why I feel that the content of the book is diluted.