Industry-standard data models are an appealing concept at first blush, but they aren’t the time savers they are cracked up to be. What’s more, these prebuilt models may inhibit data warehouse project success. Vendors and proponents argue that standard, prebuilt models allow for more rapid, less risky implementations by reducing the scope of the data […]

Whether you are developing a new dimensional data warehouse or replacing an existing environment, the ETL (extract, transform, load) implementation effort is inevitably on the critical path. Difficult data sources, unclear requirements, data quality problems, changing scope, and other unforeseen problems often conspire to put the squeeze on the ETL development team. It simply may […]

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 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 […]

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 columnsĀ and […]

Through our education and consulting practices, the Kimball Group has been exposed to hundreds of successful data warehouses. Careful study of these successes has revealed a set of extract, transformation, and load (ETL) best practices. We first described these best practices in an Intelligent Enterprise column three years ago. Since then we have continued to […]

How do you cope with “abused users, overbooked users, comatose users, clueless users” and “know-it-all users” during the requirements-gathering stage of a data warehouse/BI project? Kimball group offers its advice for proactively working with (or around) the uncooperative, unavailable, uninsightful and irrepressible types who sometimes make it hard to know just what the business needs. […]

Best practices are precision tools that should be wielded precisely and skillfully. This article describes five best practices drawn from the Kimball Method that often are described incorrectly. Data warehousing is a mature discipline with well-established best practices. But these best practices are useless or even harmful if they are described inaccurately or incompletely. One […]

DW/BI professionals are often tasked with making evolutionary upgrades and improvements to minimize cost and upheaval in the current analytic environment. We explore four upgrades that can breathe new life into legacy data warehouses. Few readers have the luxury of working with a blank slate when it comes to the development of their data warehouse/business […]