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

by Joy Mundy

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.

Genres: Bisexual, Reference, Nonfiction, Technical, Computers, Technology, Programming

792 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 2006

Reviews

[Mike Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good information if you want to build a Kimball style data warehouse with the end product being a data cube. A bit heavy on selling of consulting services, training, and other books from the Kimball Group. If you are looking to build a data cube using SQL Server this book is a great road map but it is rather dated now so you’ll have to turn to Microsoft Docs or Simple Talk to get the latest information on SQL Server.

[Roger Cogswell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a bit outdated now, but it is still some valuable information to know in working with the Microsoft stack for data management.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This follows closely to Kimball's original data warehouse lifecycle toolkit book, but with one major difference. It's all couched in terms of Microsoft BI tools. I really liked it, because it gave more concrete examples of how to implement each section as well as some minor instructions. It also showed how a SSAS could be used and addressed some metadata/master data management concepts, which Kimball doesn't get into as much detail on. On the other hand, Kimball's more generic approach provides context on things like security or the more theoretical aspects that the books was lacking. For me, the tools helped me get a better grasp of data warehousing theory by example. I did have some exposure to SSRS, SSIS and cubes before reading this.

[Louis Marier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found very high level the references about Microsoft products so if you think this book will help you developing your SSIS package or SSAS cube well, maybe it will but I'm not so sure. Anyhow, I liked reading this book, like any other in the same category (Kimball Group).

[Niels · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great description on how to build a data warehouse.
I do recommend it to the developers, technicians, managers, "architects", operators, ...