A Manager's Guide to Data Warehousing

An ideal guide for the non-technical professional eager to learn more about data warehousing

A successful data warehouse project can provide immense value for business enterprises or other organizations. Building and maintaining a data warehouse demands the combined efforts of both IT and non-technical personnel. While there are plenty of resources aimed at the technology professionals who design and build data warehouses, there has to date been no useful guide written for a non-technical audience. This book fills that void and serves as an ideal resource for business and IT managers and others from the non-IT side who want to do their part to ensure data warehousing success.

This helpful book provides a solid introduction to the fundamentals of data warehousing. The author details each step of a data warehouse project, and provides a clear explanation of what's involved in efficiently building a data warehouse and what must be done to deliver the data. You'll examine the business management of a data warehouse and discover essential methods for cultivating a strong partnership between the business and IT elements of your organization. You can use this knowledge to be more effective when sharing your requirements and concerns during a project.

A Manager's Guide to Data Warehousing explains what you need to create your data warehouse and establish long-term success. The book covers:

• The most common factors for ensuring data warehousing success and the roadblocks that can prevent it
• How to ensure that business and technical staff have a common understanding of the data warehouse project
• How to effectively communicate your business requirements for the data warehouse
• The tools you need to make certain that data is organized and can be delivered as needed
• Ways to deploy the data warehouse and ensure sustainable success

About the Author

Laura L. Reeves started designing and implementing data warehouse solutions in 1986. Since then she has been involved in hundreds of projects. She has extensive experience in end]to]end data warehouse development, including developing comprehensive project plans, collecting business requirements, developing business dimensional models, designing database schemas (both star and snowflake designs), and developing enterprise data warehouse architecture and strategies. These have been implemented for many business functions for private and public industry.

Laura co]founded StarSoft Solutions, Inc., in 1995 and has been a faculty member with The Data Warehousing Institute since 1997. She is a contributing author of Building a Data Warehouse for Decision Support (Prentice Hall, 1996) and a co]author of the first edition of The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit (Wiley, 1998). Laura graduated magna cum laude from Alma College with a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and computer science, with departmental honors.