Worryingly vague and unimplementable

I'll say at the start that this is not my kind of book. I prefer books which are useful, enlightening or both. This didn't seem to be either. From page 3: "The mission of this book is to provide a single, coherent, and comprehensive overview of the OMG's Common Warehouse Metamodel, which is easy to read.". It may be slightly easier to read than the raw specification, but it's a lot less useful. The most telling point is further down the same page where it admits to really being just an introduction to a forthcoming "Warehouse Metamodel Developers Guide".

For an overview, the book is really short on examples. It's got lots of vague UML diagrams and pretty pictures like you might see on a powerpoint slide, but not a single worked example to show how all the buzzwords and technologies might actually fit together. I also have great problems with their use of UML as a language to actually specify data models, processes and so on. For me UML is a tool to help express intentions to people, not supply details to processing software, but this book seems to ignore the difference.

If you know nothing about meta-modelling, and want the sort of information you can get from the slides of a conference presentation, this may be a useful book. If you want to understand the details, or (gosh) actually get a job done, then this book will just frustrate you.

Other Reviews

• Worryingly vague and unimplementable
• Good overview for good technology
• The emperor has no clothes
• An Excellent and Comprehensive Primer on CWM
• Excellent documentation reference