The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling (Second Edition)

The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit : Expert Methods for Designing, Developing, and Deploying Data Warehouses

The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit : With SQL Server 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset

Data Quality: The Accuracy Dimension (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)

Database Design

The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit: Practical Techniques for Extracting, Cleanin

Format: Paperback
Author: Joe Caserta
ReleaseDate: 13 September, 2004
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Rating:

A handy tool on the desk of any ETL Developer.


Most of the time this is a fairly hot seat -
because so many business requirements are dependant on the
Quality of Information produced by the ETL process.
I am currently working as an ETL Developer at a company
Fourier Approach, Centurion, South Africa.

I always asked myself,

*Am I doing the right thing?
*Is this the best solution?
*How would other developers do this?

A while ago I attended the course

"ETL Architecture and Design Workshop"

presented by Joe Caserta, and hosted by Alicornio Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Before the presentation we received a copy of the book
"The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit".

This changed my whole perspective.
The book adressed all my ETL questions,
with examples from real-world situations.
It covers the whole ETL process and gives answers
to almost every question you will ever think of asking.

I must say this is a very handy tool on the desk of any serious ETL Developer.

Regards,

André Ackermann
ETL Developer
.

Great coverage of the ETL building blocks
There is plenty of technical documentation and forums out there that are specific to one ETL tool or DBMS but this is a better starting place for ETL developers. This is one of the few references out there providing the building blocks of good ETL design. It is required reading as ETL projects often take short cuts in design, data quality and metadata management and reporting. This leads to very expensive Data Warehouse administration costs and often a complete rebuild of load jobs.

The book is relevent for people using most ETL or ELT tools and it will remain relevent for years even as the ETL products continue to advance and mature. It is targeted at DW but the basic flow of Extract, Clean, Conform and Deliver is suitable for most types of data loads.

Good coverage of the alternatives to traditional overnight bulk loads in the section on real-time ETL systems (also describes Microbatch) as the businesses and the major ETL vendors shift to SOA.

A survival Guide and a Must
This book is written for architects - not for ETL developers. A survival guide and a must have for every data warehouse architect. Written from the 10,000 foot level, many of the architectures and designs are `nice to haves' and would require tremendous commitments in resources to be implemented and thus may be too lofty for many organizations. HOWEVER, it is best to have a theoretical bulls-eye, a target to shoot for, and try to make small baby steps towards implementing the optimal solution, then not have a hypothetical utopia at all to strive for.

Looking for a comparison of ETL tools and which ones do what best? You will not find this here.

A great resource for DW Architects who may have many years of experience working on data warehouse projects but may have not had the opportunity of implementing some more elaborative meta data driven cleaning and conforming schemas - a truly interesting approach yet I'm not sure Ralph Kimball's design with the `survivorship support metadata' schema, could perform fast enough for some of the large data warehouse loading needs of larger organizations.

Separating critical issues from insignificant ones is difficult from the reading, however, the framework and methodical approach to the steps of Extract => Clean => Conform => Deliver and the role and responsibilities of the actors, i. e, DW Architect, dimensional manager, fact table provider, ect. , give the reader/architect some clear division of duties more then likely not clearly defined within the corporation.

Plenty of ERDs, actual SQL statements, templates and diagrams to use in your existing projects.

(. . . ).