This is the first book to provide in-depth coverage of star schema aggregates used in dimensional modeling-from selection and design, to loading and usage, to specific tasks and deliverables for implementation projects Covers the principles of aggregate schema design and the pros and cons of various types of commercial solutions for navigating and building aggregates Discusses how to include aggregates in data warehouse development projects that focus on incremental development, iterative builds, and early data loads

A cutting-edge response to Ralph Kimball's challenge to the data warehouse community that answers some tough questions about the effectiveness of the relational approach to data warehousing Written by one of the best-known exponents of the Bill Inmon approach to data warehousing Addresses head-on the tough issues raised by Kimball and explains how to choose the best modeling technique for solving common data warehouse design problems Weighs the pros and cons of relational vs. dimensional modeling techniques Focuses on tough modeling problems, including creating and maintaining keys and modeling calendars, hierarchies, transactions, and data quality

Geared to IT professionals eager to get into the all-importantfield of data warehousing, this book explores all topics needed bythose who design and implement data warehouses. Readers will learnabout planning requirements, architecture, infrastructure, datapreparation, information delivery, implementation, and maintenance.They'll also find a wealth of industry examples garnered from theauthor's 25 years of experience in designing and implementingdatabases and data warehouse applications for majorcorporations. Market: IT Professionals, Consultants.

"Each chapter is... a practice run for the way we all ought to design our data marts and hence our data warehouses."-Ralph Kimball, from the Foreword. Let the experts show you how to customize data warehouse designs for real business needs in Data Warehouse Design Solutions. To effectively design a data warehouse, you have to understand its many business uses. This guidebook shows you how business managers in different corporate functions actually use data warehouses to make decisions. You'll get a rich set of data warehouse designs that flow from realistic business cases. Two top experts show you how to customize your data warehouse designs for real-life business needs including: * Sales and marketing * Production and inventory management * Budgeting and financial reporting * Quality control * Product delivery and fulfillment * Strategic business analysis such as determining market share, rates of return on investment, and other key analytic ratios. CD-ROM includes All sample data warehouse designs with accompanying preformatted reports in HTML for specific business uses such as marketing, sales, and financial analysis.

Cowritten by Ralph Kimball, the world's leading data warehousing authority, whose previous books have sold more than 150,000 copies Delivers real-world solutions for the most time- and labor-intensive portion of data warehousing-data staging, or the extract, transform, load (ETL) process Delineates best practices for extracting data from scattered sources, removing redundant and inaccurate data, transforming the remaining data into correctly formatted data structures, and then loading the end product into the data warehouse Offers proven time-saving ETL techniques, comprehensive guidance on building dimensional structures, and crucial advice on ensuring data quality

The final edition of the incomparable data warehousing and business intelligence reference, updated and expanded The Kimball Group Reader, Remastered Collection is the essential reference for data warehouse and business intelligence design, packed with best practices, design tips, and valuable insight from industry pioneer Ralph Kimball and the Kimball Group. This Remastered Collection represents decades of expert advice and mentoring in data warehousing and business intelligence, and is the final work to be published by the Kimball Group. Organized for quick navigation and easy reference, this book contains nearly 20 years of experience on more than 300 topics, all fully up-to-date and expanded with 65 new articles. The discussion covers the complete data warehouse/business intelligence lifecycle, including project planning, requirements gathering, system architecture, dimensional modeling, ETL, and business intelligence analytics, with each group of articles prefaced by original commentaries explaining their role in the overall Kimball Group methodology. Data warehousing/business intelligence industry's current multi-billion dollar value is due in no small part to the contributions of Ralph Kimball and the Kimball Group. Their publications are the standards on which the industry is built, and nearly all data warehouse hardware and software vendors have adopted their methods in one form or another. This book is a compendium of Kimball Group expertise, and an essential reference for anyone in the field. Learn data warehousing and business intelligence from the field's pioneers Get up to date on best practices and essential design tips Gain valuable knowledge on every stage of the project lifecycle Dig into the Kimball Group methodology with hands-on guidance Ralph Kimball and the Kimball Group have continued to refine their methods and techniques based on thousands of hours of consulting and training. This Remastered Collection of The Kimball Group Reader represents their final body of knowledge, and is nothing less than a vital reference for anyone involved in the field.

This groundbreaking book is the first in the Kimball Toolkit series to be product-specific. Microsoft’s BI toolset has undergone significant changes in the SQL Server 2005 development cycle. SQL Server 2005 is the first viable, full-functioned data warehouse and business intelligence platform to be offered at a price that will make data warehousing and business intelligence available to a broad set of organizations. This book is meant to offer practical techniques to guide those organizations through the myriad of challenges to true success as measured by contribution to business value. Building a data warehousing and business intelligence system is a complex business and engineering effort. While there are significant technical challenges to overcome in successfully deploying a data warehouse, the authors find that the most common reason for data warehouse project failure is insufficient focus on the business users and business problems. In an effort to help people gain success, this book takes the proven Business Dimensional Lifecycle approach first described in best selling The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit and applies it to the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 tool set. Beginning with a thorough description of how to gather business requirements, the book then works through the details of creating the target dimensional model, setting up the data warehouse infrastructure, creating the relational atomic database, creating the analysis services databases, designing and building the standard report set, implementing security, dealing with metadata, managing ongoing maintenance and growing the DW/BI system. All of these steps tie back to the business requirements. Each chapter describes the practical steps in the context of the SQL Server 2005 platform. Intended Audience The target audience for this book is the IT department or service provider (consultant) who is: Planning a small to mid-range data warehouse project; Evaluating or planning to use Microsoft technologies as the primary or exclusive data warehouse server technology; Familiar with the general concepts of data warehousing and business intelligence. The book will be directed primarily at the project leader and the warehouse developers, although everyone involved with a data warehouse project will find the book useful. Some of the book’s content will be more technical than the typical project leader will need; other chapters and sections will focus on business issues that are interesting to a database administrator or programmer as guiding information. The book is focused on the mass market, where the volume of data in a single application or data mart is less than 500 GB of raw data. While the book does discuss issues around handling larger warehouses in the Microsoft environment, it is not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with the unusual challenges of extremely large datasets. About the Authors JOY MUNDY has focused on data warehousing and business intelligence since the early 1990s, specializing in business requirements analysis, dimensional modeling, and business intelligence systems architecture. Joy co-founded InfoDynamics LLC, a data warehouse consulting firm, then joined Microsoft WebTV to develop closed-loop analytic applications and a packaged data warehouse. Before returning to consulting with the Kimball Group in 2004, Joy worked in Microsoft SQL Server product development, managing a team that developed the best practices for building business intelligence systems on the Microsoft platform. Joy began her career as a business analyst in banking and finance. She graduated from Tufts University with a BA in Economics, and from Stanford with an MS in Engineering Economic Systems. WARREN THORNTHWAITE has been building data warehousing and business intelligence systems since 1980. Warren worked at Metaphor for eight years, where he managed the consulting organization and implemented many major data warehouse systems. After Metaphor, Warren managed the enterprise-wide data warehouse development at Stanford University. He then co-founded InfoDynamics LLC, a data warehouse consulting firm, with his co-author, Joy Mundy. Warren joined up with WebTV to help build a world class, multi-terabyte customer focused data warehouse before returning to consulting with the Kimball Group. In addition to designing data warehouses for a range of industries, Warren speaks at major industry conferences and for leading vendors, and is a long-time instructor for Kimball University. Warren holds an MBA in Decision Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and a BA in Communications Studies from the University of Michigan. RALPH KIMBALL, PH.D., has been a leading visionary in the data warehouse industry since 1982 and is one of today's most internationally well-known authors, speakers, consultants, and teachers on data warehousing. He writes the "Data Warehouse Architect" column for Intelligent Enterprise (formerly DBMS) magazine.