There's a lot of info here and it amounts to a college text. It's very in depth and will require as much time as any college text would. Several chapters stand out like Cleaning and Conforming. Metrics development is discussed in depth in ways that may have been overlooked in other texts like this one. The examples go very deep into generation of surrogate keys, bulk loading of Type 1s, minimum key requirements in dimensions and other ETL concepts concerning the error audit table. The book was written very obviously from practical situations encountered in daily work.The book does not present or attempt to develop the "Kimball Method" of SCD. As it turns out, that's far less important than all the other things required simply to do a day's ETL cycle for which much may go wrong. Numerous tips are worked into this text. It seems that the small things add up greatly throughout a review of the book. For example, it's a mistake to allow NULLs ever to be the prime indicator for an active Type 2 record specifically because a simple SQL call needing a date range controlled by BETWEEN will fail if the active indicator is NULL. It's the fine points like this that rate this book very highly.This is not a trivial one-time-only to read book. It seems that this sort of preparation should be more in evidence in many of the shops. Let's face it. IT but especially ETL is a high end engineering discipline, more so with EDW.As far as criticisms are concerned, the SQL examples are good but are PL/SQL and require time to decode for those developing in MSSQL environments. The book was written in 2002 when Oracle was the main player and there were not so many Teradata shops. That may make the book too back level for some readers. However, the book covers most of the subject matter devoid of specific implementation specifics, enough so that the key concepts would work regardless of the technology chosen.It's not very likely that a course like this one would even be taught at a college level and for that reason the book is a key investment. Further, this book could be used for two full semesters, based on this reviewer's experience in formal course work. It's not likely that on-the-job training would supplant the need for the knowledge contained in this book or one like it.