The Kimball Group Reader: Relentlessly Practical Tools for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

Chapter 1. The Reader at a Glance

Beginning in late 2007, Ralph wrote a series of articles for DM Review magazine (now called Information Management). Published over a 16-month time frame, this sequence systematically describes the Kimball approach and classic best practices in a cohesive manner. Rather than scattering these articles topically throughout the book, we opted to present the series nearly in its entirety because it provides an overview of the content that follows in subsequent chapters. You can think of Chapter 1 as CliffsNotes for The Kimball Group Reader.

The chapter begins with several articles encouraging you to practice restraint and establish appropriate boundaries with other stakeholders when embarking on a data warehouse/business intelligence (DW/BI) project. From there, the series turns its attention to bringing operational data into the data warehouse and then leveraging core dimensional modeling principles to deliver robust analytic capabilities to the business users.

In addition to the articles in this chapter, Ralph also wrote a very detailed article on data quality for DM Review. Due to its in-depth coverage, this article is presented in Chapter 11 with other back room extract, transform, and load (ETL) topics.

Setting Up for Success

Before diving into implementing the DW/BI system, make sure you assess the complete set of related requirements, while avoiding the risks of overpromising.

1.1 Resist the Urge to Start Coding

Ralph Kimball, DM Review, Nov 2007