The storage and management of Meta Data is a vitally important part of data warehouse development. However, the whole field of data warehousing has moved so rapidly in recent years that an agreed set of standards are still not yet in place. This means that David Marco's Building and Managing the Meta Data Repository is brave because the one certainty is that it will be out of date in short order.
(In fact it is out of date already because it doesn't refer to the important announcement made recently by the OMG--Object Management Group--which points the way to embracing XML as the unifying factor). By the same token, any book that covers this important and rapidly changing field is worth reading if you need to get a feel for the issues involved.
Marco's definition of meta data is "knowledge of systems, business, competition, customers, products and markets", encompassing technical data to enable technical staff to maintain systems on a physical level and business data so users can access the data they need to run the business. Three chapters set the scene, describing meta data, its uses and the state of standards for meta data repositories. The remaining eight chapters deal in detail with implementation issues. So, if you are building a data warehouse, and don't know why meta data is important, this is an excellent book to buy.
