A Manager's Guide to Data Warehousing

Introduction

Many executives, managers, business analysts, and nontechnical personnel are highly motivated to learn more about data warehousing. They want to understand what data warehouses are and how they work. More important, many are truly interested in doing their part to ensure success when implementing a data warehouse in their company. They are not interested in learning how to write code or tune a database.

Unfortunately, most data warehouse publications available today are written for the people who design and build them. Some are from a project management perspective and others provide a great deal of technical depth. While these are very valuable to the technical team, they do not help the nontechnical audience. This book was written to provide a resource for those nontechnical people.

Overview of the Book

The information in this book has been gathered over years of working on data warehouse projects. Hundreds of hours have been invested in learning what works well and what does not. One constant thread over the years is the need to develop and strengthen the partnership between business and systems personnel. There has always been a need to help nontechnical people in the organization understand the different parts of a data warehouse and what needs to be done to build and maintain one.

This book covers the topics and questions that come up repeatedly in executive briefings, classes, meetings, and casual conversation. It also includes coverage of topics related to how organizations ...