The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit 2nd Edition is now available

The first one is a great reference, but was published in 1998.  Since then the art and science of building the data warehouse has matured significantly.  I don't think that the word BI really existed in 1998. . . Actually I don't know since I didn't start working in the DW/BI world until 1999 with Brio, then Business Objects.

The original had a lot of great material for organizing the pro cess around preparing for, implementing and maintaining the data warehouse, including a nice set of documents.  Here is a link to the new book on Amazon.

Creating SQL 2005 Data Warehouse Metadata

One of my favorite tools to use when designing a data warehouse is the Dimensional Modeling Spreadsheet created by Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite of the Kimball Group in conjunction with their must-have book, The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit.  Not only does it allow you to fully build out your fact/dimension design, ETL logic, source-to-target mapping and more, it also generates a script that will create the first iteration of your data model once you have everything in place.  I always try to fully flesh out this spreadsheet before I create the first SQL table, it really helps get things off to a good start.  As an added bonus, Joy and Warren have a whole site full of useful tools and utilities for building a Data Warehouse.

Mark Garner has just released Beta 1 of a tool called Metashare.  He appears to have based it on the Kimball Group spreadsheet I mentioned above, and pulls the same data back out of your data model for the purposes of documentation.  I will look forward to checking out Metashare with the next DW that I build.