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

Chapter 7. Dimensional Modeling Tasks and Responsibilities

With a basic understanding of dimensional modeling concepts in hand, we turn our attention to focus on the dimensional modeling process itself—how do we go about tackling a design, who's involved, and what do we need to worry about during the design activities? This chapter is divided into two sections; the first deals with issues surrounding an initial design starting from a blank sheet of paper, and the second half deals with the tasks surrounding the review of an existing dimensional model or system implementation.

Design Activities

The articles in this section focus on the tasks and players involved during the design of a new dimensional model, beginning with a historical perspective that is still remarkably valid.

7.1 Letting the Users Sleep

Ralph Kimball, DBMS, Dec 1996 and Jan 1997

This content was originally published as two consecutive articles.

The job of a data warehouse designer is a daunting one. Often the newly appointed data warehouse designer is drawn to the job because of the visibility and importance of the data warehouse function. In effect, management says to the designer: "Take all of the enterprise data and make it available to management so that they can answer all of their questions and sleep at night. And please do it very quickly, and we're sorry but we can't add any more staff until the proof of concept is successful."

This responsibility is exciting and very visible, but most designers feel overwhelmed ...