The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, we want to thank the thousands of you who have read our Toolkit books, attended our courses, and engaged us in consulting projects. We have learned as much from you as we have taught. As a group, you have had a profoundly positive impact on the data warehousing industry. Congratulations!

This book would not have been written without the assistance of our business partners. We want to thank Julie Kimball of Ralph Kimball Associates for her vision and determination in getting the project launched. While Julie was the catalyst who got the ball rolling, Bob Becker of DecisionWorks Consulting helped keep it in motion as he drafted, reviewed, and served as a general sounding board. We are grateful to them both because they helped an enormous amount.

We wrote this book with a little help from our friends, who provided input or feedback on specific chapters. We want to thank Bill Schmarzo of DecisionWorks, Charles Hagensen of Attachmate Corporation, and Warren Thornthwaite of InfoDynamics for their counsel on Chapters 6, 7, and 16, respectively.

Bob Elliott, our editor at John Wiley & Sons, and the entire Wiley team have supported this project with skill, encouragement, and enthusiasm. It has been a pleasure to work with them. We also want to thank Justin Kestelyn, editor-in-chief at Intelligent Enterprise for allowing us to adapt materials from several of Ralph's articles for inclusion in this book.

To our families, thanks for being there for us when we needed ...