Review

A lot of people seem to cite my 1995 CIKM invited paper [3] as a survey of research issues in data warehousing. While the CIKM '95 paper does provide coverage of initial ideas and a general architecture for the creation and maintenance of data warehouses, many important warehousing topics are not covered at all. I find the Chaudhuri and Dayal survey to be more comprehensive, more practical, and because it came out two years later, more up-to-date.

In addition to discussing the issues involved in building and maintaining data warehouses, this paper discusses at length how users interact with the warehouse itself -- largely for OLAP query processing. The paper also provides a very practical perspective, covering industry motivation for data warehouses, industry's use of them, and tools for all aspects of the process. Despite its practical slant, true research issues are elucidated.

So go ahead and read my paper to get a research perspective on one aspect of the problem. Then read Chaudhuri & Dayal to learn much more, and to get a useful practical viewpoint on the issues.