The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit, Second Edition

A thorough update to the industry standard for designing, developing, and deploying data warehouse and business intelligence systems

The world of data warehousing has changed remarkably since the first edition of The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit was published in 1998. In that time, the data warehouse industry has reached full maturity and acceptance, hardware and software have made staggering advances, and the techniques promoted in the premiere edition of this book have been adopted by nearly all data warehouse vendors and practitioners. In addition, the term "business intelligence" emerged to reflect the mission of the data warehouse: wrangling the data out of source systems, cleaning it, and delivering it to add value to the business.

Ralph Kimball and his colleagues have refined the original set of Lifecycle methods and techniques based on their consulting and training experience. The authors understand first-hand that a data warehousing/business intelligence (DW/BI) system needs to change as fast as its surrounding organization evolves. To that end, they walk you through the detailed steps of designing, developing, and deploying a DW/BI system. You'll learn to create adaptable systems that deliver data and analyses to business users so they can make better business decisions.

With substantial new and updated content, this second edition of The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit again sets the standard in data warehousing for the next decade. It shows you how to:

• Identify and prioritize data warehouse opportunities
• Create an architecture plan and select products
• Design a powerful, flexible, dimensional model
• Build a robust ETL system
• Develop BI applications to deliver data to business users
• Deploy and sustain a healthy DW/BI environment

About the Authors

Ralph Kimball founded the Kimball Group. Since the mid 1980s, he has been the DW/BI industry's thought leader on the dimensional approach and trained more than 10,000 IT professionals. Ralph has his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Margy Ross is President of the Kimball Group. She has focused exclusively on DW/BI since 1982 with an emphasis on business requirements analysis and dimensional modeling. Margy graduated with a BS in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University.

Warren Thornthwaite began his DW/BI career in 1980. After managing Metaphor's consulting organization, he worked for Stanford University and WebTV. Warren holds a BA in Communications Studies from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

Joy Mundy has focused on DW/BI systems since 1992 with stints at Stanford, Web TV, and Microsoft's SQL Server product development organization. Joy graduated from Tufts University with a BA in Economics, and from Stanford University with an MS in Engineering Economic Systems.

Bob Becker has helped clients across a variety of industries with their DW/BI challenges and solutions since 1989, including extensive work with health care organizations. Bob has a BSB in Marketing from the University of Minnesota's School of Business.