This book takes two effectiveness challenges in the data warehousing field in focus. The first and the primary one is a practical challenge. With the approach introduced in this book, data warehouse construction should become substantially cheaper, faster and safer than it is today. The key for this effectiveness is the striking compactness of the approach. The second and the secondary one is a conceptual challenge. With the concise discussions around several fundamental concepts, thinking and discussing in this field should become more effective than it is nowadays. This book covers all major areas of data warehouse construction. It is introduced by a data warehouse definition and its context, four classifications, five categories of fifteen requirements, and a review of two methodologies and three constructional approaches. Along a sophisticated reference architecture, plenty of design issues, twenty-one design recommendations, eight practice recommendations, seven design principles, twenty-seven generic algorithms and techniques, twelve metadata-driven generic operators, seven working procedures, four paradigmatic foundations and the paradigm principle itself are presented systematically. There are thirty-five constructional exercises included in the book. If you have completed them during the reading, you have laid a solid fundament of a sophisticated generic data warehouse before you close the book. Otherwise, you can find the solutions in my next book of this series, i.e., "Realizing Generic Data Warehouses by Generic SQL Programming."