Friday, October 13, 2017

The Data Warehouse Lab: A step-by-step guide using SSIS and SSAS 2017



I always feel some difficulty for newbies in data warehousing to grasp all theoretical aspects due to the complexity of the tools and the long-running process of data warehousing, which starts by selecting the data source and ends by visualizing the information. Therefore, I designed several examples in my course, and I realized that the examples helped students to understand the overall picture better.

Last year, I realized that if all examples can be defined as a kind of story that students can follow them and see the overall picture, it can help even more, so it was the main motivation behind writing this book.

This book aims to help students and practitioners who are new to data warehousing to start developing a new data warehouse project from scratch. It shows different phases of data warehousing projects through a simple case. So readers can experience the full data warehouse development life-cycle through a simple example step-by-step. The book is written for the novice user, so there is no requirement for previous experience of working with MS SQL Server and other tools. However, it expects readers to know basics of databases like the table, columns, etc.

The book does not aim to teach data warehousing and multi-dimensional design principle, nor play the role of a comprehensive reference book on Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset. It only intends to help readers to gets a hands-on experience on data warehouse development quickly. It aims to give readers basic understanding and experience, so they become more confident in using reference books and online materials.

The book does not go through the installation of tools that are used in the sample project. The readers need to install the following tools in order to follow the steps, i.e., Microsoft SQL Server Database Engine, Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) 2017 , Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) 2017, Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Power BI.

For me, the best time to publish the book would be in January, since I did not have time to do serious proofreading on it. However, my course is going to start soon, so I decided to publish the book, and I will correct typos and other problems later. So, please let me know if you read the book and need some help or find some typos. At least, this is the good feature that is provided by Amazon that I can update the content of the book later :-)

Here are the links to the book:
The Data Warehouse Lab: A step-by-step guide using SSIS and SSAS 2017 Kindle Edition