The father of the data warehouse incorporates the latest technologies into his blueprint for integrated decision support systems

Having invented the corporate information factory (CIF) to help IT and database managers cut through the jungle of information technologies out there, bestselling author Bill Inmon again teams up with experts Claudia Imhoff and Ryan Sousa to show you how to integrate all key components of the modern information system architecture in a way that meets your evolving business needs.

You’ll get clear explanations on how to integrate the enterprise data warehouse with a host of new technologies and solutions that have emerged since this groundbreaking work was first published in 1998. You’ll also discover how to leverage these technologies to ensure broad access to information for end users, while reducing costs and improving scalability across the enterprise. Ultimately, you’ll learn to design, build, and implement a company-wide information ecosystem that:

• Integrates with legacy systems and the Web
• Leverages third-party ERP, CRM, and eBusiness applications
• Exploits the latest in data exploration and mining technologies
• Takes advantage of low-cost alternative storage
• Scales across the enterprise through the use of data marts and operational data stores
• Accommodates the use of multiple data warehouses
• Can start small and grow incrementally

The new edition of the classic bestseller that launched the data warehousing industry covers new approaches and technologies, many of which have been pioneered by Inmon himself. In addition to explaining the fundamentals of data warehouse systems, the book covers new topics such as methods for handling unstructured data in a data warehouse and storing data across multiple storage media, and discusses the pros and cons of relational versus multidimensional design and how to measure return on investment in planning data warehouse projects. It covers advanced topics, including data monitoring and testing. Although the book includes an extra 100 pages worth of valuable content, the price has actually been reduced from $65 to $55.

Learn essential techniques from data warehouse legend Bill Inmon on how to build the reporting environment your business needs now! Answers for many valuable business questions hide in text. How well can your existing reporting environment extract the necessary text from email, spreadsheets, and documents, and put it in a useful format for analytics and reporting? Transforming the traditional data warehouse into an efficient unstructured data warehouse requires additional skills from the analyst, architect, designer, and developer. This book will prepare you to successfully implement an unstructured data warehouse and, through clear explanations, examples, and case studies, you will learn new techniques and tips to successfully obtain and analyse text. Master these ten objectives: Build an unstructured data warehouse using the 11-step approach; Integrate text and describe it in terms of homogeneity, relevance, medium, volume, and structure; Overcome challenges including blather, the Tower of Babel, and lack of natural relationships; Avoid the Data Junkyard and combat the "Spiders Web"; Reuse techniques perfected in the traditional data warehouse and Data Warehouse 2.0 , including iterative development; Apply essential techniques for textual Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) such as phrase recognition, stop word filtering, and synonym replacement; Design the Document Inventory system and link unstructured text to structured data; Leverage indexes for efficient text analysis and taxonomies for useful external categorisation; Manage large volumes of data using advanced techniques such as backward pointers; Evaluate technology choices suitable for unstructured data processing, such as data warehouse appliances.