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

Chapter 5. Data Architecture

With the business requirements in hand, it's time to turn our attention to data architecture. We launch this chapter with a series of historically significant articles in which Ralph lays out the justification for dimensional modeling. From there, we focus on the enterprise data warehouse bus architecture and associated matrix for establishing the data warehouse's integration strategy. We provide guidance for achieving integration via stewardship, rather than being distracted by the debate over centralized versus distributed data stores. Finally, we offer a comparison of the Kimball bus architecture to the dominant hub-and-spoke alternative, the Corporate Information Factory.

Making the Case for Dimensional Modeling

The three articles in this section originally referred to data models normalized to third normal form (3NF) as entity-relationship (ER) models. Because ER diagrams merely depict the relationship between tables in a relational database management system, they can be used to illustrate both dimensional and third normal form structures. Therefore, we've changed the references from ER models to either 3NF or normalized for greater clarity throughout this section.

5.1 Is ER Modeling Hazardous to DSS?

Ralph Kimball, DBMS, Oct 1995

As mentioned in the section introduction, ER has been systematically changed to either 3NF or normalized, however we've retained the original article title from 1995. DSS is an acronym for decision support systems, the term ...