Most of the guidance in the Kimball method for designing, developing, and deploying a DW/BI system is just that: guidance. There are hundreds or thousands of rules in the Kimball Group’s many books, and I confess to having bent many of those rules over the decades, when faced with conflicting goals or unpleasant political realities. […]
Before Diving In
Time marches on and soon the collective retirement of the Kimball Group will be upon us. At the end of 2015 we will all retire. In my final Design Tip, I would like to share the perspective for DW/BI success I’ve gained from my 26 years in the data warehouse/business intelligence industry. While data warehousing […]
For my final Design Tip, I’m returning to a fundamental theme that’s not rocket science, but too often ignored: business-IT collaboration. If you buy into the proposition that the true measure of DW/BI success is business acceptance of the deliverables to improve their decision-making, then buying into the importance of collaboration should be easy. Achieving […]
I worked at a company called Metaphor back in the early 1980s. As part of a startup software company introducing then-cutting-edge concepts (such as folders, file drawers, and workflows on a graphical electronic desktop), I appreciated the benefits of using metaphors to represent seemingly complex concepts. Effective verbal and visual metaphors are able to convert complexity into […]
There are two powerful ideas at the foundation of most successful data warehouses. First, separate your systems. Second, build stars and cubes. In my previous column, I described a complete spectrum of design constraints and unavoidable realities facing the data warehouse designer. This was such a daunting list that I worried that you would head […]