Data Warehouse Design Solutions

"Each chapter is... a practice run for the way we all ought to design our data marts and hence our data warehouses."-Ralph Kimball, from the Foreword.

Let the experts show you how to customize data warehouse designs for real business needs in Data Warehouse Design Solutions.

To effectively design a data warehouse, you have to understand its many business uses. This guidebook shows you how business managers in different corporate functions actually use data warehouses to make decisions. You'll get a rich set of data warehouse designs that flow from realistic business cases. Two top experts show you how to customize your data warehouse designs for real-life business needs including:
* Sales and marketing
* Production and inventory management
* Budgeting and financial reporting
* Quality control
* Product delivery and fulfillment
* Strategic business analysis such as determining market share, rates of return on investment, and other key analytic ratios.

CD-ROM includes

All sample data warehouse designs with accompanying preformatted reports in HTML for specific business uses such as marketing, sales, and financial analysis.

Data warehouses store millions of records, allowing managers to ask the big-picture questions about their businesses. The authors of Data Warehouse Design Solutions share their expertise in designing successful data warehouses and concentrate on understanding business processes within a variety of industries.

First, the authors outline the promise--and potential hurdles--of data warehousing. They thoroughly explain the idea of dimensional data, which is used to represent the quantities or attributes that can be queried in a data warehouse. The authors argue that data warehouses need to adapt to changing business conditions and often must be more flexible than planned. They advise building the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) as a series of interlocking data marts (which contain different dimensions). Developers can build part of a solution and add new data marts later. The result is a more adaptable approach to warehousing data.

The heart of Data Warehouse Design Solutions is the descriptions of data warehouses tailored to specific industries--sales, marketing, fulfillment, production, inventory, and capacity--using real-world businesses. The authors offer business models, sample dimensions, database schema, and sample reports for each business area.

Later chapters discuss more advanced areas for data warehousing, including budget tracking, financial reporting (and managerial accounting), and even how to look at profitability and intellectual capital. The authors round out their nuts-and-bolts tour of today's businesses with a summary of the various measures that fit each type of organization. Finally, the authors come back to theory, with some ideas on building effective systems that are fast and that generate easy-to-read reports. The last chapter argues convincingly that their incremental approach to building data warehousing has some distinct advantages. --Richard Dragan