Designing a Data Warehouse : Supporting Customer Relationship Management

Rating:
Summary: Getting it right at last
Review: Excellent for showing where we've been going wrong all this time. I used to wonder why we couldn't get answers to seemingly straightforward questions. The book, although quite detailed and technical in places, explains things in an easy-to-understand way. The treatment of history, which is one of the most important things in data warehousing, is outstanding.

This will really help our CRM initiative

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Summary: design in a readable book
Review: I found this book very helpful. I needed the intro. on CRM and it puts what I am trying to achieve in context.

I think the physical implementation guide is especially helpful. The dot model concept is an inspiration and I intend to try out the customer workshops.

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Summary: The Best Data Warehouse Design Book I Have Ever Read!
Review: I have read virtually every Data Warehouse Design book that I could find, ranging from titles from Ralph Kimball to William Inmon to everybody in between, and I found this title to be by far the best, most useful, and clearly written book available on the subject. I have worked in many data warehouse environments large and small, and I find his advice to be imminently reasonable and highly valuable for anybody involved in a data warehouse construction effort.

The author's basic premise is that the chief purpose of a data warehouse should be to maximize the power of Customer Relationship Management. He covers all of the basic data warehouse concepts and then provides a conceptual model of a Wine Club as the basic example for the book. I find his use of the model exceptional, in that he starts with a transactional data model for this example and then proceeds to extend it into a well-formed dimensional data warehouse. This is rather exceptional, in that I have found that many data warehouse authors are so intent on proving the superiority of dimensional modeling that they often harshly criticize the underlying transactional models as "not representing the business problem." I have always found this to be an unfair proposition and support that idea that databases which are designed to support transaction processing are not necessarily good for decision support but that the transactional environment must be fully understood before formulating a dimensional solution.

The book deals extensively with one of the most critical elements in data warehouse design: the problem of how to handle time in the model. He examines many different roles that time plays in the model, including its role in the construction of dimensions.

The crux of his analytical efforts come with the introdution of his "Dot Modeling" method. This method provides a simple, but highly useful, conceptual framework for generating the logical model of the data warehouse. It also gives explicit support for handling most of the time-related issues. A major added benefit is that the basic Dot Modeling constructs are far simpler yet more complete than standard Entity/Relationship modeling diagrams, which makes it a joy to use with end users, who are able to construct complete and easy to comprehend data models without being required to learn any arcane Parent/Child terminologies or be dragged down into a discussion of the pros and cons of a Snowflaked model.

The rest of the book covers many other essentials of data warehouse construction, including physical implementation issues, an excellent discusion on the business justification for the project and its importance for success, and project management suggestions.

He also has a chapter discussing various software products. I agree wholehearedly with his contention that there is no such thing as a single CRM product. Rather clients are often faced with an array of numbingly complex and quite expensive options to satisfy different parts of the customer-focused needs of the data warehouse. He has wise counsel about the pros and cons of picking such applications, though he does not mention any vendors by name.

The book seems far less driven by ideological issues that tend to dominate other texts. I think that the author's experience working on data warehouses in the UK (some of the time with Hewlett-Packard) has left him much more focused on the practical issues faced in solving data warehouse construction efforts. He does hold a Ph.D. in the subject, so his level of abstraction may, however, be difficult for those who prefer cookbook solutions for their problems. But for those of us in the profession who prefer to apply active thought and analysis for what are ultimately unique problems for each client will find this book to be of imcomparable value in their careers.

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Summary: Excellent approach and really insightful
Review: If you have to deal with Customer Data Warehouse, this book will save you some precious time and improve your learning curve. It has two main contributions in the project :

- Data modeling : provides you tools and hints how to think about data modeling in a "Customer centric data warehouse"

- Project management : presents useful tools and business case approach

I highly recommend it for anyone involved in a CRM / Data Warehouse project

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Summary: Sound advice and clear guidance
Review: This book will help anyone embarking on a CRM project to at least get the Data Warehousing technical architecture right.

According to the blurb "Today's next-generation data warehouses are being built with a clear goal: to maximize the power of Customer Relationship Management". Obviously something that confuses business benefit with techhnological features. It then goes on to state interesting and somewhat obvios things such as "To make CRM-focused data warehousing work, IT professionals need new techniques, and new methodologies".

In this book, Dr. Chris Todman -- apparently one of HPs leading data warehouse consultants -- delivers the first start-to-finish methodology for defining, designing, and implementing CRM-focused data warehouses.

Accordiing to the experts the support of Customer Relationship Management starts with identifying critical design challenges that are unique to CRM-focused data warehousing. In the context of CRM, Todman reviews data warehouse conceptual models, logical models, and physical implementation, and focuses on the crucial implications of time in data warehouse modeling and querying. You'll discover how to estimate the ROI of CRM-focused data warehousing in advance; manage data warehouse projects more effectively; and select the right software for loading, extraction, transformation, querying, data mining, campaign management, personalization, and metadata. Finally, Todman previews the future of data warehousing, covering temporal databases, OLAP SQL extensions, active decision support, the integration of external and unstructured data, next-generation search agents, and more.

This is an almost complete methodology for building CRM-focused data warehouses, including elements of planning, ROI, conceptual and logical models, physical implementation, project management, and so-on.

It is quite recommended for database developers, architects, consultants, project managers, and decision-makers.

Although I have seen a lot of the ideas elsewhere - primarily in Hewlett-Packards proprietary OpenWarehouse methodology - this book weighs in with a substantially lower price tag.

Regards,

[e-mail]

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Summary: How to build a CRM database with real history
Review: We were having a real problem with the storage of real history in our CRM database. The other books we have either ignore the problem or treat it very superficially. We have found that, if we want to make predictions about customers, we need their historical data to enable us to do this effectively.
This book is the only one we have found which takes the issue of time seriously. It has a complete chapter dealing with the issue and introduces some enlightening ideas in database design which we have adopted with good results.

We also liked the no nonsense introduction to the analytical aspects of CRM.

The whole book is written in an easy to read, chatty style which makes it pleasing to pick up.

Also we have used the chapters on ROI and project management with positive results. There is an entire chapter on Requirements gathering, introducing a system called Dot Modelling which we plan to use - but haven't used yet.