Advanced Data Warehouse Design / Data-Centric Systems and Applications (PDF)

Elzbieta Malinowski is a professor at the department of Computer and Information
Science at the Universidad de Costa Rica and a professional consultant in
Costa Rica in the area of the Data Warehousing. She received her master degrees
from Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University, Russia (1982) and
University of Florida, USA (1996), and her Ph.D. degree from
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium (2006). Her research interests
include data warehouses, OLAP systems, geographic information systems,
and temporal databases.

Esteban Zimányi is a professor of computer science at the Engineering Department of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. He received the BSc degree (1988) and the doctorate degree (1992) in computer science from the Sciences Department at the ULB. His current research interests include conceptual modeling, geographic information systems, spatio-temporal databases, and semantic web.

"The origins of data warehousing are rooted in solid practicality. Data warehousing began as a response to the pain and frustration of the analytical/management community in large corporations.

It is thus a sign of maturation that a theoretical work has arisen that explains the theory behind data warehousing. This is that work.

The book is a well thought out. While not a breezy read, the book is nevertheless accessible to the common practitioner. One feature of the book is that it includes ample material on both traditional data warehousing and spatial and temporal data warehouses. The work on spatial and temporal data warehouses is an extension of current data warehouse thought and is welcome. In fact, it can be said that the heart of the book is the contributions on spatial and temporal data warehouses.

But there are many other features that are positive contributions as well. Equally covered are the relational model and the object relational model. The book fairly recognizes both the strengths and the weaknesses of the different model types and the book is quite fair in the criticism. (This is important because – for whatever reason – often times when models are discussed, the discussion often turns into a religious food fight, where each side professes that its model is the only true and righteous way. This book does not condescend to this low level of discussion, and that is one of the strengths of the book.)

I saw only one small passage that I took exception to in the book. The book states that data marts can be created directly from source systems. While this is true – such creations can be made – when they are made, the resulting structure is not a data warehouse. But this is a small point and does not detract from the other very positive contributions made by the book.