The Official Guide to Informix/Red Brick Data Warehousing documents the process of creating a top-flight data warehouse from project definition, through information gathering and preliminary designs, and finally to implementation with Informix Red Brick Decision Server. Building a data warehouse--a high-capacity, high-transaction-volume database that exists for the purpose of centralizing an organization's information and making it available to support decisions--is much more than an everyday exercise for database managers. Because they're so complex and potentially so central to the operations of their businesses, they have to be designed and implemented with care. Some of the material in this book may seem extraneous to people who have managed big projects before and wish only to learn about the product, but Robert Hocutt's work should prove illuminating to anyone who reads it. Hocutt likes to explain his subject with prose, and he's good at doing so. He'll typically describe a concept or behavior, then rattle off a series of straight facts, well suited to buttressing a design decision. The author understands that the design of an organization's data warehousing infrastructure is an intimate process, and he does his readers a service by sharing facts, expressing opinions, and leaving actual processes up to them. That said, he's liberal with SQL examples that illustrate Red Brick Decision Server's special capabilities; these are best located through the index in the heat of implementation. This is a fine document on Informix's data warehousing product. --David Wall
Topics covered: Large-scale data warehousing with Informix Red Brick Decision Server, explained for all the members of the teams designated to design and implement it. Project scoping, business-process discovery, database design, data scrubbing mechanisms, and query setup all get attention. Special sections deal with installation, query processing (including parallel queries), sizing, and segmentation. A CD-ROM includes a sample database for experimentation and dry runs.
