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Author Archives: Ralph Kimball

About the Author: Ralph Kimball

Ralph Kimball

Ralph Kimball is the founder of the Kimball Group and Kimball University where he has taught data warehouse design to more than 10,000 students. He is known for the best selling series of Toolkit books. He started with a Ph.D. in man-machine systems from Stanford in 1973 and has spent nearly four decades designing systems for users that are simple and fast.

A Dimensional Modeling Manifesto

Drawing the Line Between Dimensional Modeling and ER Modeling Techniques Dimensional modeling (DM) is the name of a logical design technique often used for data warehouses. It is different from, and contrasts with, entity-relation modeling (ER). This article points out the many differences between the two techniques and draws a line in the sand. DM […]

It's Time for Time

The importance of the time dimension in data marts and data warehouses. The time dimension is a unique and powerful dimension in every data mart and enterprise data warehouse. Although one of the tenets of dimensional modeling is that all dimensions are created equal, the truth is that the time dimension is very special and […]

Data Warehouse Insurance

Insurance is an important and growing sector for the data warehousing market. Several factors have come together in the last year or two to make data warehouses for large insurance companies both possible and extremely necessary. Insurance companies generate several complicated transactions that must be analyzed in many different ways. Until recently, it wasn’t practical […]