Building the data warehouse

Reviewer: Kalman Balogh

This issue of the Communications of the ACM is dedicated to the rich and complicated theme of Data Warehousing. It is not an introduction to the theme, rather a state-of-art from practical point of view. It droves our attention to the process of Data Mart and Data Warehouse creation and usage before the big boom of its application. The series of articles emphasises and illustrates in more and more detail, why careful selection of the approach and the tools, building the projects and planning and design the implementation processes is inevitable. After the overview it starts with managerial considerations. It shows the possible ways, the costs, the intangible and measurable benefits. To clarify notions and purposes, it contrasts the transaction-oriented operational databases and the functional division or enterprise-wide information stores. It explains role of the information catalog or repository and metadata management. Some articles describe concrete developments at different large firms and organisations (logistics, investment, communications firm, health care). Successful architectures and some vendors (IBM, NCR) and development tools are introduced. It was not the aim to enumerate and compare the main vendors of the technology, but rich and interesting sites on the Web are enumerated.

Reviewer: M. Adam Mahmood

How to build a data warehouse is a complex contemporary topic. The author starts by asking and answering a number of questions that one must first consider. He then discusses a number of important concepts, such as scalability and informational and operational data, before discussing the framework and methodology, which should be carefully considered beforehand. Next, he elaborates on the basic steps that a warehouse project manager should go through in choosing a framework for a data warehouse. The paper's main strength is that it discusses basic reasons why some data warehouse projects fail and what precautions help others succeed. This material should be useful to anyone thinking about designing a data warehouse. The paper's main drawback is that it does not provide any technical information on how to build a data warehouse, but I realize that this is a conceptual piece and, as such, is not required to go into technical details.