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 extract a limited amount of source data to develop […]

Some clients and students lament that while they want to deliver and share consistently-defined master conformed dimensions in their data warehouse/business intelligence (DW/BI) environments, it’s “just not feasible.” They explain that they would if they could, but with senior management focused on using agile development techniques to deliver DW/BI solutions, it’s “impossible” to take the […]

With the current industry buzz focused on master data management (MDM), it’s time to revisit one of the most critical elements of the Kimball method. Back in 1999, Ralph Kimball wrote an Intelligent Enterprise column entitled The Matrix. The 1999 movie of the same name spawned two sequels, but we haven’t devoted a column to […]

The Kimball bus architecture and the Corporate Information Factory: What are the fundamental differences? Based on recent inquiries, many of you are in the midst of architecting (or rearchitecting) your data warehouse. There’s no dispute that planning your data warehouse from an enterprise perspective is a good idea, but do you need an enterprise data […]

Many of you are already familiar with the data warehouse bus architecture and matrix given their central role in building architected data marts. The corresponding bus matrix identifies the key business processes of an organization, along with their associated dimensions. Business processes (typically corresponding to major source systems) are listed as matrix rows, while dimensions appear as matrix […]

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 […]