If you are new to this field and the way you like to get into a new field is by getting an overview, I suggest that you:
Read the books "Building the Data Warehouse" by W. H. Inmon, "The Data Warehouse Toolkit" by Ralph Kimball, "Data Warehouse from Architecture to Implementation" by Barry Devlin, and "Data Warehousing in the Real World" by Sam Anahory and Dennis Murray
- With due respect to all the other fine books on data warehousing and decision support, when read in combination I believe these four books provide a great introduction to and overview of the strategic and tactical issues system developers face (even though the books are several years old - despite what you read in the trade media, data warehousing does not change that much.) Especially valuable are Inmon's overall overview and description of the iterative nature of data warehouse development, Kimball's description of data modeling principles and query/report tools, Devlin's descriptions of data extraction, cleaning, and loading issues and metadata, and Anahory/Murray's description of what can be done so a system can run efficiently and their description of the main tasks in a data warehouse project. If you are a really ambitious reader, consider a couple of other titles. "The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit" by Ralph Kimball, et. al., is a 700+ page, clearly written description of a methodology for constructing data warehouses. If you use Oracle, "Oracle8i Data Warehousing" by Gary Dodge and Tim Gorman provides practical technical advice that even a non-DBA can understand and appreciate. Finally, "Data Warehouse Design Solutions" by Christopher Adamson and Michael Venerable provides insight on model design for specific business problems. (By the way, the above material contains the only recommendations of commercial products in this site. There is no commercial connection between this site and the authors or publishers of the books just cited.)
Visit a couple of organizations that have had warehousing systems in production for over a year
You will get an excellent education if you can ask an organization who 'has done it' what are the biggest issues it faced in developing systems and what are the biggest issues it faces in maintaining systems. Also, ask what the organization felt it did right and what it felt it could have done differently. I believe that if you do this you will learn a great deal aspects of data warehousing that do not get discussed much in the literature - specifically the politics of data warehousing projects, the maintenance burdens data warehousing imposes, and how to deal with data warehousing software/hardware vendors and consultants.
Read up on some fundamental technical topics
You may find you will be greatly helped by reading up on SQL queries (especially multi-table and summary queries and subqueries), database indexing, join processing, and how query optimization works. Also helpful would be some knowledge about how logical structures can be created and how database partitioning can be used in conjunction with logical structures. - There are many fine books on SQL. The latter knowledge will most likely be found in books aimed at DBAs for specific commercial databases.
Build something!
Computer texts love to cite a (supposedly) Confucian quote "What I hear I forget. What I see I remember. What I do I understand." Well, this quote is apt in the case of learning about data warehousing. After you build something, no matter how modest, you will gain a more profound appreciation of the topic. 凡是有该标志的文章，都是该blog博主Caoer（草儿）原创，凡是索引、收藏
、转载请注明来处和原文作者。非常感谢。
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