There is now a second edition of the Kimball Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit, which contains updated material for SQL Server 2008 R2. The book is out now in the US, and will be released in the UK in towards the end of March. I’ve got hold of a copy, so I thought it would be worth giving it a review.
As with the previous edition, the new version of the book starts off by covering the Business Requirements, before explaining the core concepts associated with the Kimball approach, such as surrogate keys and slowly changing dimensions, for example.
An overview of the Microsoft BI stack is given, before explaining how to build each part of the data warehouse in turn, covering the database engine, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS and SharePoint. There are also new sections on both Master Data Services and PowerPivot – personally I found the PowerPivot chapter to be really interesting – there’s a good explanation of how PowerPivot can compliment the data warehouse, as well as explaining how to use it of course.
The latter part of the book explains management of the data warehouse, covering security, backups, metadata, maintenance. The final chapter, “Present Imperatives and Future Outlook” includes a narrative on common problems in DW projects, as well as an honest appraisal of the MS BI stack which you can’t help but agree with. |
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So the burning question is should you buy this book? That needs to be answered from two perspectives – 1)If you’re an owner of the original and 2)If you don’t own the original. If you do own the original, then you’ll find that there’s a huge amount of content that’s the same across the two editions. There is new content – particularly around MDS, PowerPivot, Change Data Capture and Compression, for example, as well as updates to some of the old content. £30 is quite a lot to pay for a book that’s similar to a book that you already own, but overall I think its worth going for.
If you don’t own the original then you will find this book to be an extremely useful asset in implementing MS data warehousing solutions, and I wouldn’t hesitate to buy it. One point I will make is that this doesn’t represent an exhaustive how to for each of the components (E.g. SSAS), which I personally think is fine. I know a handful of people made this gripe at the first edition, but realistically there’s only so much you can cram into 648 pages on the huge subject of data warehousing AND then cover each element of the MS BI stack.
I’m pleased to say that I’m delivering a couple of Master Data Services sessions at Microsoft events over the next few months.
SQL Bits
Firstly, as I’m sure you’ve heard, SQL Bits 8 is running in Brighton from 7th – 9th April. I’m delivering a session on the Saturday that will show how Master Data Services business rules work, which will include looking at how to create and use a SharePoint workflow.
Although last I heard it was getting pretty full, you can hopefully still register for SQL Bits here.
Tech Days 2011
Tech Days is running again this year, from the 23rd – 25th May. There are a number of sessions running for Tech Days in London over the 3 days, covering areas such as Windows Azure, Windows Phone and of course SQL Server. The session that I’m doing is to show how we’ve implemented Master Data Services at one of clients, EMI, and how they benefit from using MDS.
You can register for Tech Days 2011 here.