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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

In Design Tip # 69, Identifying Business Processes, Margy discussed the importance of recognizing your organization’s business processes and provided guidelines to spot them. We dive into more details here. Focusing on business processes is absolutely critical to successfully implement a DW/BI solution using the Kimball Method. Business processes are the fundamental building block of a dimensional data warehouse. […]

Readers who follow the Kimball approach can often recite the 4 key decisions when designing a dimensional model: identify the business process, grain, dimensions and facts. While this sounds straightforward, teams often stumble on the first step. They struggle to articulate the business process as it’s a term that seems to take on different meaning depending on the […]

Alan Alda is still widely known as “Hawkeye” Pierce from the hit television series “M*A*S*H” but he’s also the long-time host of the PBS series “Scientific American Frontiers,” in which he interviews research scientists. Discussing his 11-year hosting stint on National Public Radio recently, Alda described his approach for eliciting information from brilliant scientists. His […]

The Kimball methodology of building a data warehouse is often called a bottom-up approach. This label, along with its associated connotations, is misleading, and misunderstandings about our approach are proliferating. It’s time to set the record straight: Although our iterative development and deployment techniques may superficially suggest a bottom-up methodology, a closer look reveals a […]

One of the most prevalent fallacies in our industry is that data marts are defined by business department. We’ve seen countless data warehouse architecture diagrams with boxes labeled “Marketing Data Mart,” “Sales Data Mart,” and “Finance Data Mart.” After reviewing business requirements from these departments, you’d inevitably learn that all three organizations want the same core information, such as […]