Articles
Ralph Kimball and other Kimball Group members have written over 120 columns for Intelligent Enterprise Magazine and its predecessor, DBMS Magazine.

Articles by date
2008  2007  2006  2005  2004  2003  2002  2001  2000  1999  1998  1997  1996  1995

Articles 2007
Handling Arbitrary Restatements of History
How do you cope with an executive's request to "bring back a time series of activity for all subscribers who were in platinum status as of X date," or "show me a time series of orders by sales region according to the sales organization as of Y"? Here's how data warehouse pros can cope with the common requirement to look back in time.
By Joy Mundy—December 9, 2007

The Subsystems of ETL Revisited
These 34 subsystems cover the crucial extract, transform and load architecture components required in almost every dimensional data warehouse environment. Understanding the breadth of requirements is the first step to putting an effective architecture in place.
by Bob Becker—October 21, 2007

Educate Management to Sustain Data Warehouse/BI Success
Data warehousing and business intelligence success cannot be taken for granted. You must create an ongoing education and communication program to maintain your success and extend it across the organization.
by Warren Thornthwaite—August 27, 2007

Keep to the Grain in Dimensional Modeling
When developing fact tables, aggregated data is NOT the place to start. To avoid "mixed granularity" woes including bad and overlapping data, stick to rich, expressive, atomic-level data that's closely connected to the original source and collection process.
by Ralph Kimball—July 30, 2007

Overcoming Obstacles When Gathering Business Requirements
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?
by Margy Ross—June 1, 2007

Dimensional Relational vs. OLAP: The Final Deployment Conundrum
The choice between deploying relational tables or OLAP cubes is not a trivial matter. Weigh these 34 pros and cons of each approach early in the design of your extract-transform-load system.
by Ralph Kimball—April 27, 2007

Think Critically When Applying Best Practices
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.
by Bob Becker and Ralph Kimball—March 26, 2007

Pick the Right Approach to MDM
It's time to migrate master data management upstream to an integration hub or, ideally, an enterprise MDM system. And if you have yet to do anything about data consistency, take these four steps toward integration and stewardship.
by Warren Thornthwaite—February 7, 2007