We are looking to design and build a data warehouse for our organisation and would like suggestions for books explaining the concepts, advantages and pitfalls. At this stage we are interested in the concepts, therefore a platform independent view would be preferable.

-- John Smith (j-smith@iname.com), March 07, 2001

Answers

There are actually quite a few platform-independent books on building a data warehouse. Three of the best, IMHO, are "The Data Warehouse Toolkit : Practical Techniques for Building Dimensional Data Warehouses" by Ralph Kimball (John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471153370), "Data Warehouse : From Architecture to Implementation" by Barry Devlin (Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201964252), and "Building, Using, and Managing the Data Warehouse" edited by Herbert A. Edelstein (Prentice Hall; ISBN: 0135343550). I'm sure there are others that are just as good as these but these are a few of my favorites. The last one is a collection of essays and you might consider buying it along with one of the other two to get a good overview of DW implementation and management issues. Good luck...

-- Craig S. Mullins (Craig_Mullins@BMC.com), March 12, 2001.