Finding the Right Data Warehousing Book: Sorting Through the Heap

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

One day, you wake up and get that epiphany. Data warehousing has always been your lifelong dream. You are so excited that you rush off to your local bookstore or make the arduous journey to the data warehousing library in Flint, Michigan--the Mecca of data warehousing knowledge--to buy that perfect warehousing book. (There is no actual library in Flint.)  

Once you get there, you are confronted with further choices. In front of you, you see numerous names: Hackney, Kimball, Inmon, Imhoff, Marco, Linhoff, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, the Dummies book…books blur in front of your eyes. You can't decide which one as cold sweat pours down your back. You have 15 minutes to decide, otherwise your window of opportunity may be lost. Never fear, the data warehouse book recommender is here!

If you are the data warehouse neophyte looking for depth--one book wins hands down. And the winner is…The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit by Ralph Kimball, Laura Reeves, Margy Ross and Warren Thornthwaite. Ralph Kimball is the mass-proclaimed father of data warehousing. As founder of Red Brick Systems, Ralph pioneered the dimensional modeling approach and has written numerous articles and is a thought-leader in the data warehousing space.

Having met "The Man" myself, I can personally attest to his deep technical knowledge in the space. The Data …

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