Have your read Kimball's Data Warehouse Toolkit? I'm partial to the first edition (1996). It's mostly conceptual stuff: design rationale, OLTP vs OLAP, fact vs

Have your read Kimball's Data Warehouse Toolkit? I'm partial to the first edition (1996). It's mostly conceptual stuff: design rationale, OLTP vs OLAP, fact vs dimension, type II SCDs (very important), surrogate keys, aggregate navigation etc. Most code in a data warehouse is ETL code, and much of that is obscured behind the interface of big-name tools like Informatica. I don't think you are interested in that. People who roll their own have typically rolled with Perl. Try a search on Perl + ETL and you might find something. Other items of interest: * Pentaho, an open-source BI suite. Includes ETL, reporting and multidimensional cubes. * Column-oriented data stores like Vertica, Sybase IQ, MonetDB, and Infobright. MonetDB and Infobright are both open source. Infobright integrates with MySQL, so that might be up your alley. * SSDs may or may not turn data warehousing on its head. Yet to be determined. * schema-driven ETL is very powerful: define an input view/function, a target table, a few naming conventions, and generate your ETL code directly off the system tables--ETL with opinions, as it were. EDIT: For online resources, I used read intelligententerprise.com. Can't vouch for its current quality. Back then it was hit or miss, and promotional items frequently overshadowed substantive material.