The Data Webhouse Toolkit: Building the Web-Enabled Data Warehouse
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Author: Ralph Kimball, Richard Merz
List Price: $60.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0471376809
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (20 January, 2000)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 8,537
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 3 out of 5
Making out like a bandit.
No, the book is not by the Doctor R. Kimball played by Harrison Ford in "The Fugitive" (although this R. Kimball is making out like a bandit with his Data Warehouse series.) This primary goal of this book is to cash in on the outrageous amounts of money poured into the web during the dot com bubble. Ralph Kimball wanted his piece of the action, and has extracted a tremendous pile of loot from the naive dot com companies buying into the webhouse dream.As with a lot of other manifestations of the dot com bubble, the book seems to oversell the technology. "Personalized banner ads" and other expensive ideas have returned pennies on the dollars. Many implementations of the webhouse have proven that there is a point where data warehouse investments no longer have a positive ROI. IMHO Data warehouse technology has its greatest impact in mature companies with mulitple years of data to analyze, and determine trends. It is not quite fit for young companies that are in the process of self definition. Many failed dot coms poured millions into webhouses that never returned a dime. In some cases, the webhouse diverted resources from the main product, and contributed to the company's fall. All of Kimball's books are well written. They are designed to give insight into both the political and architectural dimensions of a data warehouse project. (Data warehouse projects are generally hot beds of political intrigue. Generally the project is launched by the CEO and MBAs to improve reporting...so the data architect is generally more involved in power politics than the standard IT guy. ) I decided to only give this book only three stars because of the unfortunate tendency we all have to over promise. I wanted to temper some of the six star praise. If you are interested in learning about data warehousing, I would start with Immon, and the first DW Toolkit, and not spend any cash on this volume.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Excellent
I use this book directly in my current project and it is so useful.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Good Introduction to Web Data Warehousing
I am an avid reader of Ralph Kimball's books on Data Warehousing. I find that the books he authors well written and delivers the critical information in a digestable manner."Web Enabled Data Warehouse" is not an exception. I would recommend this book more to beginners than to readers who are already familiar with Data Warehousing and fundamentals of the Internet. Areas where the book does not have enough focus is on dynamically created pages and effect on Data Webhouse. If you are already familiar with Data Warehousing there many not be much new to glean from this book. There are differences that are encountered with a Webhouse than traditional Warehousing but the info in this book will not necessarily bridge the gap.
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