Chapter 17
Kimball DW/BI Lifecycle Overview
The gears shift rather dramatically in this chapter. Rather than focusing on Kimball dimensional modeling techniques, we turn your attention to everything else that occurs during the course of a data warehouse/business intelligence design and implementation project. In this chapter, we'll cover the life of a DW/BI project from inception through ongoing maintenance, identifying best practices at each step, as well as potential vulnerabilities. More comprehensive coverage of the Kimball Lifecycle is available in The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit, Second Edition by Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross, Warren Thornthwaite, Joy Mundy, and Bob Becker (Wiley, 2008). This chapter is a crash course drawn from the complete text, which weighs in at a hefty 600+ pages.
You may perceive this chapter's content is only applicable to DW/BI project managers, but we feel differently. Implementing a DW/BI system requires tightly integrated activities. We believe everyone on the project team, including the analysts, architects, designers, and developers, needs a high-level understanding of the complete Lifecycle.
This chapter provides an overview of the entire Kimball Lifecycle approach; specific recommendations regarding dimensional modeling and ETL tasks are deferred until subsequent chapters. We will dive into the collaborative modeling workshop process in Chapter 18: Dimensional Modeling Process and Tasks, then make a similar plunge into ETL activities in Chapter ...
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