Product Description

"A comprehensive, thoughtful, and detailed book that will be of inestimable value to anyone struggling with the complex details of designing, building, and maintaining an enterprise-wide decision support system. Highly recommended." -Robert S. Craig, Vice President, Application Architectures, Hurwitz Group, Inc.

In his bestselling book, The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Ralph Kimball showed you how to use dimensional modeling to design effective and usable data warehouses. Now, he carries these techniques to the larger issues of delivering complete data marts and data warehouses. Drawing upon their experiences with numerous data warehouse implementations, he and his coauthors show you all the practical details involved in planning, designing, developing, deploying, and growing data warehouses. Important topics include:
* The Business Dimensional Lifecycle(TM) approach to data warehouse project planning and management
* Techniques for gathering requirements more effectively and efficiently
* Advanced dimensional modeling techniques to capture the most complex business rules
* The Data Warehouse Bus Architecture and other approaches for integrating data marts into super-flexible data warehouses
* A framework for creating your technical architecture
* Techniques for minimizing the risks involved with data staging
* Aggregations and other effective ways to boost data warehouse performance
* Cutting-edge, Internet-based data warehouse security techniques

The CD-ROM supplies you with:
* Complete data warehouse project plan tasks and responsibilities
* A set of sample models that demonstrate the Bus Architecture
* Blank versions of the templates and tools described in the book
* Checklists to use at key points in the project

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #337002 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 800 pages

Amazon.com Review
In The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit, authors Ralph Kimball, Laura Reeves, Margy Ross, and Warren Thornthwaite present a structure for undertaking the awesome task of implementing a data warehouse. As part of a rather select group of professionals actually experienced in building data warehouses, the authors attempt to convey their expertise about how to approach the job. The book focuses on the "Star Lifecycle"--a high-level project-planning approach to evolving existing information systems into an ever-changing data-warehouse solution. --Stephen Plain

From the Publisher
Ralph Kimball's bestselling The Data Warehouse Toolkit explained how to design data warehouses using the dimensional modeling technique he developed. This perfect complement to that book shows how dimensional design fits in the overall lifecycle of planning, designing, developing, and deploying data marts and data warehouses. Based on the real experiences of four leading data warehouse developers and offering timely case studies, this book provides developers with the fine details on how to master each step in the process. It also covers how to design data marts that are well integrated with the overall data warehouse design.

From the Back Cover
"A comprehensive, thoughtful, and detailed book that will be of inestimable value to anyone struggling with the complex details of designing, building, and maintaining an enterprise-wide decision support system. Highly recommended." —Robert S. Craig, Vice President, Application Architectures, Hurwitz Group, Inc.

In his bestselling book, The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Ralph Kimball showed you how to use dimensional modeling to design effective and usable data warehouses. Now, he carries these techniques to the larger issues of delivering complete data marts and data warehouses. Drawing upon their experiences with numerous data warehouse implementations, he and his coauthors show you all the practical details involved in planning, designing, developing, deploying, and growing data warehouses. Important topics include:

• The Business Dimensional LifecycleTM approach to data warehouse project planning and management
• Techniques for gathering requirements more effectively and efficiently
• Advanced dimensional modeling techniques to capture the most complex business rules
• The Data Warehouse Bus Architecture and other approaches for integrating data marts into super-flexible data warehouses
• A framework for creating your technical architecture
• Techniques for minimizing the risks involved with data staging
• Aggregations and other effective ways to boost data warehouse performance
• Cutting-edge, Internet-based data warehouse security techniques

The CD-ROM supplies you with:

• Complete data warehouse project plan tasks and responsibilities
• A set of sample models that demonstrate the Bus Architecture
• Blank versions of the templates and tools described in the book
• Checklists to use at key points in the project

Customer Reviews

Everything you ever wanted to know about DW ....
but were afraid to ask. This is the definitive book on the DW lifecycle. After having worked on two not-so-perfect data warehousing projects, I found myself on more than one occasion seeing in print many of the ideas that I have either arrived at by trial and error or had a hunch were the right way to go. I would have given this book five stars, except for one thing: you really need to have read Kimball's first book, The Data Warehouse Toolkit, to get the proper foundation for reading the DW Lifecylcle Toolkit. I bought the DW Lifecycle Toolkit first thinking that I could jump right ahead. Not so. Much to my chagrin, I ended up buying the DW Toolkit and reading it first. These books really should be offered with the option to be purchased together. That way, the reader will know up front that both books are a must read.

Good book, but could've been better
Not enough examples....they keep referring to other books. The book would've been awesome if it had more examples (specially designing star schema models and aggregations). I don't like to spend $40-50 each on two books just to get the examples and lot of the repeat information. The book companies and the authors are making more money by doing this, but they're not winning fans (Wiley books and Kimball)

This is clearly the BEST Data Warehouse book I've read!!
Our organization has implemented a very successful Data Warehouse, due largely to following the design and deployment principles from Dr. Kimball's two textbooks. The key to a successful Data Warehouse is providing all business users an easy to use and high performance queryable system. The dimensional design is, without a doubt, the defacto standard for Queryable Data Warehouses, and the author does a superb job motivating its use and explaining how to develop your integrated, dimensional data warehouse. In addition, the author gives valuable advice on many, many other aspects of the process, such as assessing your readiness for proceeding with a warehouse effort. This book is a "must read" for anyone involved in a Data Warehouse project. You will have an excellent chance of succeeding with even a most complicated Data Warehouse System if you follow the wisdom in this book.