I can tell - this author has built real data warehouses. This book has so many real world application concepts, distilled into less than 500 pages. I.E. it is not not a bible book, that which puts you to sleep, although it is a great reference book. It is Inmon and Kimball agnostic - huge benefit here. While the DW toolkit books are great, they are only great for Kimball warehouses. Being in the Inmon camp, I appreciate the authors' coverage of the concepts of the Operational Data Store, and Normalized Data Store. This book should be the first book you read in building a data warehouse. Although the specific sql code examples show SQL Server code, all concepts can be applied to Oracle, etc. Only a couple complaints. There is a lack of coverage for modeling localization, i.e. modeling for local language requirements of the users. The author should also mention that Data Modeling tools, such as ErWin, PowerDesigner (best IMO), or ER/Studio can really enhance metadata modeling, and documentation, although he covers metadata very well. That aside, I still give this book a 5 star rating, in lieu of all the theory books out there, which lack real world application examples.