Data warehousing is a vast subject. It’s very basic ideas are described in our previous tutorial resource. For further explanation on the subject, we’ll be reviewing some books, to provide a better understand on which are the best resources to get a data warehousing concepts pdf.
The reviewed books are already part of a revisioned list of the best and more popular data warehouse concepts books. We always suggest the reading of all of them to become an expert on data warehousing, but every single one are very useful resources on their own.
Our reading selection
We have reduced a large list of data warehousing books, and related subjects, to a small set of four amazing resources that you MUST read.
The next table summarizes our review about these chosen books. Then, we talk about each of them in a more detailed way.
| Book | Title | Focus | Price | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling | Modeling, ETL | $$$$ | 4.7 |
 | The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit | Practical Techniques | $$$ | 4.7 |
 | The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit | BI with SQL Server 2008 | $$$ | 4.5 |
 | Mastering Data Warehouse Design | Building Data Warehouses | $$ | 3.5 |
The previous books have distinct focus ideas, specific to data warehousing building and designing. Reading them will provide you a solid knowledge of data warehousing. Despite that, we suggest practical exercises by building an actual data warehouse to consolidate all the information read in these books and other kind of sources.
Book Reviews
The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling
This book is an outstanding guide to learn how to model every type ao data warehouse. It starts with the explanation of the fundamentals, evolving to more difficult and interesting cases. A lot of modeling techniques are described and presented, supporting this theory with solid real-world case studies.
Besides it’s focus on modeling, there’s also a significant part on ETL methods, to explain how to build up the data structure of the data warehouse.
The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit
The focus of this book is to describe methods used in data warehousing, which were learned by experience. All the process of creating and maintaining a data warehouse is explored, beggining with the architecture and ending on developing a Business Intelligence application.
This book walks you throught every step of data warehouse development, providing the best methods gathered with years of expirience and testing. All the steps are explained in detail, combined with practical examples of the techniques that will aid you to understand clearly all the ideas in this book.
The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit
This book describes how to implement data warehousing solutions in the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database. The emphasys of the book relies on business intelligence systems build on SQL Server. All the features of SQL Server, related to data warehousing, are described. Among them we have the BI Toolset and SQL Server analysis and reporting.
Every one of these features is backed up by a theoretical description, which is supported by several code and practical examples. This way, the book provides great resources to learn by example. Without any doubt, this is the best book covering data warehousing with Microsoft components.
Mastering Data Warehouse Design
Describing the various approaches to design a data warehouse, is the main focus of this resource. Here are discussed the most effective techniques that are widely used on he actual market. The book gives a lot of importance to the modeling and design of a data warehouse, providing solutions to hard modeling problems and discussing them.
If you want to become an expert on designing a data warehouse, by modeling in a efficient and clean way all the data, this is the book to read.