Time marches on and soon the collective retirement of the Kimball Group will be upon us. In my final Design Tip, I would like to share the perspective for DW/BI success I’ve gained from my 26 years in the data warehouse/business intelligence industry. While data warehousing has been around now for a long while, there […]

For my final Design Tip, I’m returning to a fundamental theme that’s not rocket science, but too often ignored: business-IT collaboration. If you buy into the proposition that the true measure of DW/BI success is business acceptance of the deliverables to improve their decision-making, then buying into the importance of collaboration should be easy. Achieving […]

Over the years, we’ve worked with countless exemplary DW/BI project team members: smart, skilled, dedicated, and motivated, coupled with a healthy dose of mutual trust, respect, and camaraderie with their teammates. Teams with members who possess these characteristics tend to fire on all cylinders, with the resulting whole often greater than the sum of the […]

Our website and books are loaded with guidance about designing dimensional models for the data warehouse/business intelligence (DW/BI) presentation area. But dimensional modeling concepts go beyond the design of databases that are simple and fast. You should think dimensionally at other critical junctures of a DW/BI project. When gathering requirements for a DW/BI initiative, you […]

Many organizations are embracing agile development techniques for their DW/BI implementations. While we strongly concur with agile’s focus on business collaboration to deliver value via incremental initiatives, we’ve also witnessed agile’s “dark side.” Some teams get myopically focused on a narrowly-defined set of business requirements. They extract a limited amount of source data to develop […]

Keeping tight control over the scope of your data warehouse/business intelligence (DW/BI) program is an important ingredient for success. Surprisingly, in some organizations it’s equally important to ensure that the program doesn’t suffer the theft of its scope after an otherwise good plan has been developed. It’s nearly impossible to tackle everything at once in […]

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 […]

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 […]

I’ve fielded several questions recently regarding agile development methodologies. People seem to want a quick binary response: do we support and approve of agile methods or not? Unfortunately, our reaction is not so clearly black-and-while. One thing for certain is that the agile approach has enthusiastic supporters. Tackling the topic via a Design Tip might be akin to […]

Many data warehouse teams lean heavily toward the doing side. They leap into implementation activities without spending enough time and energy to develop their data models, identify thorough business rules, or plan their data staging processes. As a result, they charge full speed ahead and end up re-working their processes, delivering bad or incomplete data, and generally causing themselves […]