Building the Unstructured Data Warehouse: Architecture, Analysis, and Design

Did not really like the book. Took one quick look at book and returned it on the same day. If I pay $35 for a book expect more than this. I could get the same information doing my own research.

Inmom is considered as traditional data warehousing expert. He along with Kimball have given much of taxonomy, theory and buzz words to data warehousing industry. In my opinion the practical value of their traditional data warehousing work could be summed in 20 pages but they both had written volumes on it. That should give you some clue on what the value of this book could be. Author seems unable to conceive the idea of unstructured data (but this is what the technology of the day is) so he tries futile to expand his vision of traditional data warehousing into this new arena. Being old school author clearly seems to even not like the idea of unstructured data, tough consistently trying to interpret the new subject with old mindset, which is not even appropriate. Nevertheless did not forget his signature move of giving useless terminology like Blather, Data Junkyard etc. It's like Cobol programmer writing a book on Java.

I might state this a few ways, because this is what these authors have done to fill up this 'book':This book is robbery.This book is a waste of time.This book contains no useful information that could not have been found on two introductory wikipedia articles.This book contains endless repetition (paraphrasing) both within and across chapters.This book is totally overpriced and may well be your biggest purchase regret on amazon.If you are a 'business leader' or a clueless techie you might get something from this. But if you are in any way clued in to big data or text based analytics forget this fast.Or to put it another way: Don't waste your money.

I currently work for an insurance company and we are in the process of gathering requirements to bring lots of text into our data warehouse from the customer service area. This book could not have come out at a better time. Our data warehouse contains mostly structured data and our initial approach was to bring all of the text in and treat it no differently than the more structured data such as dates and codes. We did not have the knowledge base on our team to do something different with the text.This book greatly helped our data warehouse team in two areas. The first is in explaining terms to our managers so they understand the complexities with analyzing text. The book has a clear way of explaining concepts so that we can then use this same approach when talking with management. Phrases such as the possibility of creating a "Data Junkyard" resonated very well with management. The second area is in storage and indexing strategies. Originally our plan was to bring in all of the text from the customer service area. We got the idea from this book to bring in only the essential data and then point back to the source where the actual data lives. There are over a dozen different indexing strategies discussed in this book, many of which our database team had never considered.They say a book meets its expectations if you can garner a couple of gems from it. This book definitely has lots of gems. A must read if you currently have a data warehouse and have the business requirements to analyze text.

Just like nature of unstructured data, this book has lot of volume and blather. Gets me no where reading this book.

Good data centric process view