Dimensional Data Warehousing with MySQL: A Tutorial

Product Description

Data warehousing with MySQL, a free and popular database, has never been made easier with this step-by-step tutorial on building dimensional data warehouses. Topics include star-schema modeling, populating (Extract, Transform, and Load: ETL), testing, and dimensional querying. It comes complete with a hands-on case—scaled-down from a real project—as well as an electronic copy of all MySQL scripts and sample data available for download. Computer programmers who need to build a data warehouse will find relevant examples and information written in a thorough, easy-to-follow style.

Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #190350 in Books
* Published on: 2007-04-01
* Format: Illustrated
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 448 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author
Djoni Darmawikarta built his career at IBM and currently works for a Canadian insurance company as a technical specialist in its data warehousing/business intelligence team. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Customer Reviews

One dimensional and disappointing2
I found this book very disappointing. This book contains just one kind of information - simple MySQL implementation descriptions for standard data-warehouse structures. There's no discussion of what data-warehousing is, why you would do it or why a particular structure is better or worse than another.

I can only imagine that this book would be useful if you happened to be a data-warehouse expert with a very poor grasp of basic MySQL usage. It's hard to imagine anyone with even a small amount of MySQL experience finding this book useful.

And just a final note, the book's example are focused on using MySQL on Windows XP. Who in their right mind would build a data warehouse on MySQL running on Windows XP? The section on setting up a scheduled job using Windows XP's scheduled task wizard is hilarious!

Best practical introduction to Data Warehousing if you're using MySQL5
I had skimmed through the authoritative Toolkit books and found them very verbose. This book is a very hands on no-nonsense introduction to Data Warehousing.

One of the thngs that this book provided that I haven't seen in any other DW books I've come across is actual MySQL scripts used to demonstrate each lesson. If you have read a few Data Warehousing books, you'd read that the ETL (Data loading) part is the most complex piece and most books won't go into detail how its done. This book provides detailed scripts on how one goes about getting data from a production database into the Data Warehouse. I think this alone is worth the price of the book!

I come from the OLTP side of the business having written many J2EE apps for e-commerce, content systems and enterprise intergration projects. My 15+ years of experience made me ill prepared for a BI project - I didn't have a clue what a "star schema" meant.

The chapters of this book are very easy to follow and in no time I totally understood the principles and practices behind OLAP, and felt comfortable enough to set up a very simple Data Warehouse.

I'm surprised this book isn't more well known as I can't recommend it enough!

A lucid Introduction to data warehousing4
I'm new to MySQL and this was my first book on the subject. The author has done a great job of writing for a specific skillset and not wasting our time with alot of fundamentals or too advanced stuff. I'm somewhat learning challenged and found the organization of the material to aid greatly in my grasp of the subject.

Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2

Product Description

Flexible Rails is a unique, application-based guide for using Ruby on Rails 2 and Adobe Flex 3 to build rich Internet applications (RIAs). It is not an exhaustive Ruby on Rails or Flex reference. Instead, it is an extensive tutorial in which the reader builds multiple iterations of an interesting RIA using Flex and Rails together.

Author Peter Armstrong walks readers through eleven iterations in which the sample application--pomodo--is variously built, refactored, debugged, sliced, diced and otherwise explored from every conceivable angle with respect to Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex. The book unfolds both the application and the Flex-on-Rails approach side-by-side.
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #131112 in Books
* Published on: 2008-01-23
* Format: Illustrated
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback Editorial Reviews

About the Author
Peter Armstrong is a professional developer who has been working with Flex full-time since July 2004 and Ruby on Rails since mid-2005--that's before Rails 1.0. His background includes five years of working with Java Swing and a brief stint with PHP during the dotcom bubble in 2000.
Customer Reviews

Best book for ROR with Flex5
I found it best technical book till date but you should know Flex & Ruby before you can jump into this..

Great combination of technologies5
I have used Flex for about a year and I have only dabbled in Ruby/Rails development. I have been curious how I might back a Flex front end with a simple service layer that isn't hard to create, maintain or host. So far I have only worked with Java/Spring/Hibernate backend services which can take a little while to build and integrate (Grails is MUCH faster).

After about 100 pages I'm in interation 4 building an interesting RIA with a Rails backend that I can host on relatively inexpensive server if I wanted to. My only struggles thus far was getting MySQL going properly. But that was only because I forgot a step in installing it.

If you have little exposure to Rails and/or Flex and you feel at home on the command line as well as you do in an IDE like Eclipse, this is a great "project" book for you. I'd say you probably want a primer in Ruby, Rails and Flex before you get going but it is pretty easy follow and has a lot of free professional advice from someone that has obviously been around the block a few times. Peter is very upfront about some things that he has done in the book that should not be considered "best practice".

I am hoping to get some good insight how I might do something similar for Flex and Grails. Regardless, I am confident this is going to be a fun journey!

great book5
This is a great book. Peter is the #1 expert in Flex + Rails.