What are good books to learn more about business intelligence?

I would recommend - Building the Data Warehouse by Bill Inmon. Although originally published in 1992 (wow, that long ago!) there have been subsequent revisions. Bill is known in the industry as "the father of Data Warehousing". And this will help you / your client with the fundamentals.

Ralph Kimball, as Andrew mentions, is also a great read. Both authors are prolific in the field.

Claudia Imhoff again is another prolific writer in this field with some tremendous material available. Some co-writing with Bill too!

All three are pioneers in this space.

There are many other terrific authors, but I would recommend these people to help get the basics down in business intelligence.

The Data Warehouse Institute is also an invaluable resource...www.tdwi.org

Best of luck.

Hi Ted - There is no substitute for more formal education, but if you're on Twitter, you can check out the following of my lists, which may give you some interesting resources, people and ideas:

http://twitter.com/home#/list/MTLawrence/bi
http://twitter.com/home#/list/MTLawrence/bi-professionals

(And that invite is open to anyone else interested, of course!)

Also, IBM's Mike Biere has also just had a book published: "The New Era Of Business Intelligence - Using Analytics to Achieve a Global Competitive Advantage". I haven't read it all yet, but the following topics are covered:
 
• Understanding the scope of today’s BI solutions and how they fit into existing infrastructure
• Assessing new options such as SaaS and cloud-based technologies
• Avoiding technology biases and other “project killers”
• Developing effective RFIs/RFPs and proofs of concept
• Setting up competency centers and planning for skills development
• Crafting a better experience for all your business users
• Supporting the requirements of senior executives, including performance management
• Cost-justifying BI solutions and measuring success
• Working with enterprise content management, text analytics, and search
• Planning and constructing portals, mashups, and other user interfaces
• Previewing the future of BI

Or else, feel free to comment with your details if you want a chat about BI as a career.
Good luck.
Mark
(Learning Intelligence Leader, IBM Global Business Services)

Take a look at "The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit" 2nd edition by Ralph Kimball - A thorough update to the industry standard for designing, developing, and deploying data warehouse and business intelligence systems.

I recommend very highly the book by Robert Kiyosaki "Rich Dad Poor Dad" on the best seller list for over 11 years. Learn about the value of MONEY needed to be successful in any kind of business.

I appreciate your book recommendations. I also appreciate you taking the time to put a few words behind each book. It will really help me in determining which book to start off with.

Sheila, I have read "Rich Dad Poor Dad" and I think it is a fantastic read. Great book!

Thanks

I have compiled a more or less complete list with data warehousing books (excluding data mining).

The site also contains book reviews on data warehousing for project managers & business analysts, data warehousing on the Oracle technology stack, and general data warehouse design and architecture.

http://www.data-warehousing-books.com

I would stick with Bill Inmon, the father of Data Warehousing or Claudia Imhoff and avoid Ralph Kimball.

Kimball uses a data mart strategy where you add a new mart for new needs. The problem is data integrity and response times as you grow and need to scale. This is a decentralized approach that really only works well for smaller organizations.

The Bill Inmon approach is to use a central data warehouse (enterprise data warehouse) all of the data is kept and maintained in the enterprise store and the data marts source their information from the data warehouse. You can still have data marts, but the centralized data allows for much larger BI systems and faster access.

In Kimball's approach information is always stored in the dimensional model and they just access each other. As you grow you can get huge bottlenecks.

Kimball's approach is faster and fine if you are small -- but if you plan to grow or are already big it can become a real problem over time.

I have just read 'Succesfull Business Intelligence'' by Cindi Howson.
I consider this as a very good introduction to the field of Business Intelligence. Broad scope, a minimum of technical stuff and well written.
Recommended!

Agile Data Warehousing by Ralph Hughes, Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres and Performance Dashboards by Wayne W. Eckerson are some of Lancet employees' favorites.

The answer depends on the type of knowledge and information you need.

If you're looking for a "best practices" or "how to" guide, The Performance Manager (published by IBM) provides a great framework for combining Business Intelligence with financial performance management for a full-scale solution. You can find it here: http://bit.ly/coNUsT

If you're looking for innovative titles that talk about using data to drive decisions, I'd recommend any of these: Moneyball (Michael Lewis), The Ghost Map (Steven Johnson), Show Me the Numbers (Stephen Few), Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, or Freakonomics, by Dubner and Levitt. Here's a link to an interview we did with Stephen Dubner a while back: http://bit.ly/aMnjV6

The Institute for Data Center Professionals has an online certificate program in business analytics. The textbook we use for the Business Intelligence course is Data Warehousing Fundamentals by Paulraj Ponniah. We also recommend an Excel text and the text called, Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques by Witten and Frank. If you are interested in looking into the course, visit our site- www.idcp.org

Hello Ted,

Hope that my answer is usefull to you and gives you a pretty solid insight in the fascinating world of Business Intelligence.

Good books from managers POV;
1. Mike Biere - Business Intelligence for the Enterprise,
2. Steve Williams & Nancy Williams - The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence ( absolute must ),
3. Cindi Howson - Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App ( very good to read, and a must ),
4. Efraim Turban - Business Intelligence a managerial approach.

From project POV on a BI projects livecycle ;
1. Addison Wesley - Business Intelligence Roadmap: The Complete Project Lifecycle for Decision ( a must )

If you are new to Business Intelligence i wouldnt go into "technical" stuff yet, BI is triggered by the business and therefore its important one knows what the business drivers are rather then dive into any Kimball's Toolkits or Inmon's building DWs, books that you could read after you have some solid knowledge about BI.

The books mentioned above are on top of my lists to 'must read', good luck Ted!

Please contact me if you have any question.

Hi Ted. I would recommend BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting (Addison Wesley) http://amzn.to/bQjzZE.