Commentary:
Mastering Data Warehouse Design: Relational and Dimensional Techniques
by Claudia Imhoff, Nicholas Galemmo and Jonathan Geiger (Wiley, 2003)

The back cover of this book states, “Most data warehouse managers, designers, and developers are familiar with the open letter written by Ralph Kimball in 2001 to the data warehouse community in which he challenged those in the Inmon camp to answer some tough questions about the effectiveness of the relational approach.” Curiously, the letter referred to is not in the book, but the book claims to “address head-on the challenging questions,” and even mentions Ralph’s name five times on the back cover! We can only wonder how people who read this book know whether or not the questions have been answered! This just doesn’t make good sense to us.

We suspect most data warehouse managers, designers, and developers are not familiar with this “letter” which was an informal posting to the List Server hosted at www.DataWarehousing.com, sponsored by DataMirror. In our tradition of working hard to provide complete and accurate practical information, we have published the posting here just as it appeared on the List Server.

Click here to read Ralph’s 2001 open letter to the data warehousing community.