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

Introduction

The Kimball Group's article archive has been the most popular destination on our web site (www.kimballgroup.com). Stretching back fifteen years to Ralph's original 1995 DBMS magazine articles, the archive explores more than 200 topics, sometimes in more depth than provided by our books or courses. In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to organize this valuable collection because it has grown by accretion; many of the topics were driven by events, opportunities, and advances in the art of data warehousing.

With The Kimball Group Reader, we have organized all of the articles in a much more coherent way. But The Reader is more than merely a collection of our past magazine articles and design tips verbatim. We have trimmed the redundancy, made sure all the articles are written with the same consistent vocabulary, and updated many of the figures. This is a new and improved remastered compilation of our writings.

Intended Audience and Goals

The primary reader of this book should be the analyst, designer, modeler, or manager who is delivering a data warehouse in support of business intelligence. The articles in this book trace the entire lifecycle of DW/BI system development, from original business requirements gathering all the way to final deployment. We believe that this collection of articles serves as a superb reference-in-depth for literally hundreds of issues and situations that arise in the development of a DW/BI system.

The articles range from a managerial ...