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Web Farming for the Data Warehouse
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Author: Richard Hackathorn
List Price: $49.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1558605037
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann (30 October, 1998)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 91,815
Average Customer Rating: 4.57 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 2 out of 5
The content is a little thin
I liked the conceptual portion at the beginning of the book. The idea of incorporating unstructured data with a data warehouse is something I've done in the past, and he makes a nice case for having both. The rest of the book is of questionable value.There are many data warehouseing or web books that provide better overviews of protocols and standards, which take up space that could be put to more practical use explaining how to build systems rather than labeling parts. The other big problem is that a lot of the book is dedicated to product information. It mentions products that vanished around the time the book was published (Junglee, for example). The information on companies providing data extraction, parsing and online information products and services is hopelessly out of date. So is information on metadata standards, which changed drastically from 1998 to now.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Interesting... but why?
Those of us that build Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence systems for a living have, for too long, focused on the analysis of internal corporate performance indicators, and short-changed the integration of external information that provides the context that leads to knowledge. Yes, we can report units sold, costs and profits, perhaps even ROI; but we have not done all that we can do to describe the relationship between these things and the theatre in which we operate: the stock market, interest rates, monetary exchange rates, the weather, political events, disasters, changing laws and regulations, new competitors appearing and old competitors dying off, etc., etc.In short, we've been pretty good at answering "what" is happening within our organizations, but not so good at answering "why". How best to remedy this? Richard Hackathorn does the industry a huge service by describing, in the most pragmatic way, why it is a good idea to take the acquisition and integration of external information with our operational business data very seriously, and he provides a number of pragmatic techniques for exploiting the expanding resources available on the Internet for precisely this purpose. This is really quite exciting stuff - and my company, along with (I suspect) many others, has actually evolved its business model in order to more fully embrace the potential of some of the ideas expressed within this excellent book; I'm not sure that a more positive endorsement is possible. Jim Stagnitto, VP & CTO, Questral, Inc.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Thorough: enough theory and plenty of examples
Dr. Hackathorn's compendium of data farming theory, techniques, and resources is about the most useful guide you can find for understanding the mining possibilities of the sprawling Internet. Not too technical first half is readable, and the second half is a treasure-trove of tools and resources.
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