Book Reviews

Building A Data Warehouse for Decision Support

By Vidette Poe, Patricia Klauer and Stephen Brobst

Reviewed by Steve Buchwald, CIRM

Ever hear of Data Warehouses? Do you know what they are? Are you interested in how to use them? Is your company involved in creating one? Do you wonder why your MRPII system can't provide all the analytical data needed for decision support? Well, maybe you aren't interested in this topic, but I can assure you a lot of people are. That is why I decided to get some education in the field. This book was published in 1998.

Reading this book won't make you an expert on the subject of data warehousing but it will certainly give you a good understanding of the terms, concepts, and phases that a company needs to learn and master its data warehousing journey. I found the book most complete as each chapter tells you what it will tell you, then it tells you, and then it tells you what it told you. Each chapter also includes a section called "Tips from the trenches."

The book starts with the basics, including a chapter devoted to terms and technology. Then it goes on to discuss architecture, critical success factors, and the decision support life cycle. Next, it discusses the data warehouse development including the pilot and the mindset and process needed to gather data. This book then does a fine job in describing the difference between data integration and data transformation. The final sections of the book deal with designing the database for a data warehouse, successful data access, training support and rollout. At the end of the book, a whole chapter is dedicated to metadata, data about data, and how to use it, and its purpose in a well designed data warehouse.

If you are a MRPII implementation consultant I don't think you can survive in today's environment if you don't know the vocabulary and process of data warehousing. Transactional data is not the data for decision support. In addition, multi-valued MRP structured fields and cryptic field names are not user friendly. Therefore, I believe that the current movement to data warehousing will increase in popularity. As a case in point, let me share with you that recently one client asked my company if we could help them manage a data warehouse project. If this happened to you what would you do? Would you know what questions to ask to begin the project plan? This book will help you to survive. It will help you to understand what questions to ask and what the answers mean. In this book a team of experts presents a start to finish, state of the art guide to designing and implementing data warehouses. This book will not make you an expert but it will certainly give you a leg up on the competition that think a data warehouse is for MIS technical weenies.

I invite you to share your comments with me. You can contact me at casperb@earthlink.net. Until then let me say good reading.