Margy Ross and Bob Becker wrote the following articles and Kimball Design Tips. Additional Design Tips written by our Kimball Group colleagues are available on the Kimball Group website; the complete library of Kimball Group articles and Design Tips is available in the latest Kimball Group Reader, Second Edition – Remastered Collection (Kimball/Ross, Wiley 2016).

This article describes six key decisions that must be made while crafting the ETL architecture for a dimensional data warehouse. These decisions have significant impacts on the upfront and ongoing cost and complexity of the ETL solution and, ultimately, on the success of the overall BI/DW solution. Read on for Kimball Group’s advice on making […]

A student in a recent Data Warehouse Lifecycle in Depth class asked me for an overview of the Kimball Lifecycle approach to share with their manager. Confident that we’d published an executive summary, I was happy to oblige. Much to my surprise, our only published Lifecycle overview was a chapter in a Toolkit book, so this Design Tip […]

A student attending one of Kimball Group’s recent onsite dimensional modeling classes asked me for a list of “Kimball’s Commandments” for dimensional modeling. We’ll refrain from using religious terminology, but let’s just say the following are not-to-be-broken rules together with less stringent rule-of-thumb recommendations. Rule #1: Load detailed atomic data into dimensional structures. Dimensional models […]

It’s no secret that the US and global economies are facing difficult times. If the economic pundits are correct, we are now working through the most challenging economic decline of most of our lifetimes. Many of your organizations have already made significant reductions in staffing and spending. The data warehouse/ business intelligence (DW/BI) sector seems […]

Successful data warehouse and business intelligence solutions provide value by helping the business identify opportunities or address challenges. Obviously, it’s risky business for the DW/BI team to attempt delivering on this promise without understanding the business and its requirements. This Design Tip covers basic guidelines for effectively determining the business’s wants and needs. First, start by properly preparing […]

There is a tendency for data warehouse project teams to jump immediately into implementation tasks as the dimensional data model design is finalized. But we’d like to remind you that you’re not quite done when you think you might be. The last major design activity that needs to be completed is a review and validation of the dimensional […]

What does it take to develop a robust dimensional model? Here’s how to get from requirements-gathering to final approval in a process that will ferret out the good, bad and ugly realities of your source data and help you avoid surprises, delays and cost overruns. Kimball Group has written more than 250 Intelligent Enterprise columns and […]

Students often blur the concepts of snowflakes, outriggers, and bridges. In this Design Tip, I’ll try to reduce the confusion surrounding these embellishments to the standard dimensional model. When a dimension table is snowflaked, the redundant many-to-one attributes are removed into separate dimension tables. For example, instead of collapsing hierarchical rollups such as brand and category into columns […]

It’s surprising the number of DW/BI teams that confine the responsibility for designing dimensional models to a single data modeler or perhaps a small team of dedicated data modelers. This is clearly shortsighted. The best dimensional models result from a collaborative team effort. No single individual is likely to have the detailed knowledge of the business requirements and the […]

Ralph’s first article on data warehousing appeared in 1995. During the subsequent 13 years, we’ve written hundreds of articles and Design Tips, as well as published seven books. Remarkably, the concepts that Ralph introduced in the 1990s have withstood the test of time and remain relevant today. However, some of our vocabulary has evolved slightly over the years. This […]