The data warehouse solves the problem of getting information out of legacy systems quickly and efficiently. If designed and built right, data warehouses can provide significant freedom of access to data, thereby delivering enormous benefits to any organization. In this unique handbook, W. H.

Inmon, "the father of the data warehouse," provides detailed discussion and analysis of all major issues related to the design and construction of the data warehouse, including granularity of data, partitioning data, metadata, lack of creditability of decision support systems (DSS) data, the system of record, migration and more.

This Second Edition of Building the Data Warehouse is revised and expanded to include new techniques and applications of data warehouse technology and update existing topics to reflect the latest thinking. It includes a useful review checklist to help evaluate the effectiveness of the design.