The torture of having to identify which of the many combinations of Pentaho, Java and some freeware plugin actually works in the end has completely ruined this experience. I don't care if SOMEWHERE in the notes there is info I should install Version 5.0.2.3 instead of 5.0.whatever, this is just plain laziness in the course design by picking software which might have worked in the past and then not updating the instructions while pocketing the student's money for years to come. I have about had it with spending my nights installing and re-installing this junk of software nobody uses anyways in a real business setting only to advance in this class.

Personally I don't recommend this course. I really need to learn data warehousing for my job and I have no problem with learning by doing. This course gave me basics, but the learning was very stiff. I think it's just to theoretical here.

The quality of assignments is awful

Disgracefully outdated course that does not match with the technology that it claims to use -- dont bother with this one

Pentaho does not work, hence I was not able to complete week 2 assignment and the course.

No guidance from instructors, and the assignments have nothing to do with the lectures. If I could get a refund, I would quit and get my money back. Not worth the frustration.

Good learning for Data integration and ETL learning. How data from source to target table transform over the business requirement to be ready for processing

The course content is what saves this course from getting a really low score. I actually learned a lot about data warehousing so I can forgive a lot of the logistical problems that this course has, and these problems are not necessarily problems with this course but may be more widespread among coursera in general. Take this course if you are interested in data warehousing but are willing to be a completely independent learner. The course forums are full of people asking for their assignments to be graded which doesn't make sense because I never had to post anything, and mine were eventually graded. Module 2 has a bug where there are 2 assignments to choose from, but coursera thinks you have to complete both to pass the module.

The assignments are interesting and you will learn a lot if you actually complete them. From doing peer reviews I noticed a lot of people not even doing the assignment and hoping that people will just give them a passing grade. There is also a lot of plagiarism going on because I graded the exact same submission many times.

Aside form the issues above, I learned a lot, and I think it is actually worthwhile to take the course if you are patient and can self-teach.

good material but should update some videos since program versions have changed.

The course content is well structured. The lessons' delivery is clear and concise. Apart from that, there is much room for improvement:

The content is very outdated. Also, some of the course material should be rewritten (E.g., I lost count of how many times the course material states something different regarding which RDBMSs can be used for the assignment).

Many topics are presented using Excel or Excel-equivalents:

(a) In module 2, WebPivotTable is used to explain data cubes. WebPivotTable is just Excel pivot tables in a web interface.

(b) In module 3, the assignment tasks us with designing a data warehouse through the combination of a database and an unstructured Excel file. In real business settings, Excel files created and maintained by users should never be used as sources for operational databases/data warehouses, especially by combining them with data produced and maintained by operational IT systems.

(c) In module 5, the Pentaho assignment tasks us with loading Excel and Access files to a database. Data integration tools in real life are used to combine data sources coming from different IT systems and combining them into a single (Or multiple) data warehouse. The process of loading data from a file into a database is a trivial task, and is not handled by tools such as Pentaho. Thus, I think a more representative example should be used to demonstrate the tool's usage.

Topics that I would like to see covered in a course such as this:

(a) More in depth presentation of relational data warehouse schema design.

(b) Presentation of different types of data integration and use cases for each (Batch vs real time).

(c) Presentation of modern data engineering tools, e.g. cloud data warehouse offerings (Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, e.tc.), data integration tools (Apache Kafka, Apache Airflow), infrastructure as code tools (Ansible, Terraform, e.tc.) and their usage in data warehouse implementations, programming languages used for data pipeline design (Python, Scala, e.tc.), NoSQL databases and their usage in data engineering.

5 stars for content and assignments; 2 for peer-reviewed grading

The content in this course is very good. You'll learn some good concrete skills, while completing some challenging assignments.

The peer reviewed assignments are problematic. Cheating is rampant. Your peers will often turn in empty assignments, I assume so they can get access to the answer file. I have had to review assignments that were blatantly plagiarizing the answer file. Another peer even plagiarized my own work as his. I have flagged multiple submissions as plagiarism, but I don't think Coursera does much of anything with these flagged submissions, since cheating is so commonplace throughout the platform. I just tell myself that I'm here for the learning; I can't stop others from stealing my own work. Seriously, who takes a MOOC just to cheat??

I suppose the integrity and honesty problems I mention above are more problems pertaining to the Coursera platform as a whole, but having your own work plagiarized definitely affects your experience and perception of a class. Furthermore, it should be up to the course designers to develop assignments that work in spite of Coursera's problems.

Despite all this, I will be continuing with the course series, as this is fascinating stuff.

A very good course. It is challenging, especially the assignment in week 3, but extremely rewarding. Thanks to Coursera and the University of Colorado for creating this course. Really good to get an understanding of enterprise level data warehouses.

Overall a great course mixing concepts, technical skills and self learning very well. I'd recommend this course for anyone who is looking to learn about building data warehouse from scratch with minimal starting knowledge.

Again, professor Michael Mannino presents a very well prepared course that achieves optimal results in limited time. This course provides the background and basic skills necessary understand and work with Data Warehouses.

Excellent course in the way of preparation to be a Expert in Business Intelligence and Data Warehouses.

100 % recommended!

I've learned lots from this course. I highly recommend it if you want to learn the concepts behind data warehouses.

I love both the theoretical and practical nature of this course. Enough content is provided to ensure a smooth introduction to data warehouses and proficiency in the important concepts of Extraction, transformation and loading. The progression of content across the weeks is excellent and Michael is definitely the best instructor in the subject.

I enjoyed learning this material and found that the Pentaho Kettle hands-on experience was a nice additional to skill set that I can provide my clients.

A pretty decent course; the topics covered are really interesting and I enjoyed learning more about data warehouse design concepts and principles!

However I feel like the video lectures could have been better. There could have been more details and more examples illustrating the topics. I also think there is a lot of 'filler' in each video. Even for a 6 minute video lesson, the first minute is spent with the intro & lesson objectives, and the last minute is the summary. Do we really need this for a 4 minute lesson? I'd rather they have added more actual lesson materials instead of spending 2 minutes on every video with these intro-objective-summary parts.

Also the assignments could have been better. They are slightly more complicated than what was taught during the videos and I'd have again preferred some more detailed lessons illustrating more closer examples to what is asked during the assignments.

The peer review should be more standardized. There is dramatically inconsistent grading where accurate submissions are failed without warrant causing frustration instead of continued learning. The actual course content is five stars for me. Just the peer review needs cleaning up in my opinion.