Re: data warehouse books

  • From: "Dennis Williams" <oracledba.williams@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: joe_dba@xxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:09:12 -0500

Joe,

What is your role with this new DW? Architect? Implementer?
Jack-of-all-trades?
  - I felt Ralph's books gave me a good understanding of the objectives of
DW. He tends to approach DW from the end objective.
  Ralph especially shines when describing the different types of DW. For
example, a grocery store checkout register would be a point-in-time DW. But
that wouldn't correctly model a warehouse. You might take point-in-time
snapshots at the end of every month, but a lot can happen during the month,
with goods arriving at the warehouse or leaving. So you need different DW
models for different applications.
  - I've tried to read Inmon's books and articles. He tends to approach DW
from the IS point of view. They never made sense to me, but others swear by
Inmon. People tend to fall into one of the camps (Kimball vs. Inmon) from an
emotional standpoint. Get the feel of the people in your group.
   Both authors generously have many articles on their web sites, but it is
good to get a book and read it cover-to-cover to get an organized
introduction.

For the Oracle DBA, the implementation go-to guy as far as I'm concerned is
Tim Gorman. Attend one of his seminars if you can. He is very generous with
papers and utilities on his web site. Here is a link to a paper he gave at
our user group:
http://www.tcoug.org/Archive/Fall2004/DWScaling_TCOUG_101404.ppt

Dennis Williams

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