Advanced data warehouse design. From conventional to spatial and temporal applications (Q2473379)

A data warehouse, as an integral part of decision support system, is a database that collects particular details about the activities from an organization for discovering strategic information. Spatial dimension, although present in a data warehouse, is usually not used at its full potential that includes hierarchies and measures represented using spatial data. The book, written by two active researchers in the field, is the first one covering the topic of spatial data warehousing. The style of presenting information, guiding the reader gradually through different phases of the design process, such as requirements specification, conceptual, logical, and physical design, covering the entire spectrum, from theory to implementation, has an important contribution to dissemination of knowledge from this field. The conceptual design is incorporated into the data warehouse by using two complementary approaches: analysis-driven design (starts from the analysis requirements of decision-making users) and source-driven design (begins with the analysis of the information in the sources providing data to the data warehouse). The book has eight chapters (Introduction, Introduction to databases and data warehouses, Conventional data warehouses, Spatial data warehouses, Temporal data warehouses, Designing conventional data warehouses, Designing spatial and temporal data warehouses, Conclusions and future work) almost each one ending with a 'Related work' section that is a valuable tool for the reader for deepening the topics covered. Also the reader will benefit from the extensive bibliography with many references. One of the stronger points of this material is the presence of many real-world examples, Microsoft Analysis Service 2005 and Oracle 10g being the tools chosen for implementation of conceptual models. Students from a graduate or advanced undergraduate course will find the book as a major repository of the main concepts and results of data warehouse design, researchers can use it as an introduction to the state of the art on this topic, while the practitioners from industry will find many approaches for data warehouse design.