Kimball Design Tips

Drilling across separate business processes is one of the most powerful applications in a data warehouse. We often describe drilling across as magic: separately open connections to the dimensional models for each business process, fetch answer sets from each process labeled identically with row headers drawn Read More

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 Read More

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. Read More

The business intelligence industry has been using the phrase self-service business intelligence (BI) for several years. Self-service BI means enabling the business user community to create their own reports and analyses from scratch. Self-service business intelligence is nothing new. The Kimball Method has focused on delivering Read More

Ralph introduced the concept of slowly changing dimension (SCD) attributes in 1996. Dimensional modelers, in conjunction with the business’s data governance representatives, must specify the data warehouse’s response to operational attribute value changes. Most Kimball readers are familiar with the core SCD approaches: type 1 (overwrite), Read More

Each data warehouse/business intelligence (DW/BI) lifecycle iteration delivers a coherent, incremental data set that provides value to the organization and can be implemented in a relatively short time frame. All too often, DW/BI teams lose their business focus during the project and concentrate on selecting a Read More