The Kimball Group Reader

Introduction

The Kimball Group's article and Design Tip archive has been the most popular destination on our website (www.kimballgroup.com). Stretching back twenty years to Ralph's original 1995 DBMS magazine articles, the archive explores more than 250 topics, sometimes in more depth than provided by our books or courses.

With The Kimball Group Reader, Second Edition, we have organized all of the articles in a 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.

After considerable discussion, we decided to update many time references and edit content throughout the book to provide the perspective of 2015 rather than leaving old dates or outdated concepts in the articles. Thus an article written in 2007 may use 2015 in an example! When articles refer to the number of years that have passed, we have updated these references relative to 2015. For example, if a 2005 article originally said “during the past five years,” the article now reads “during the past fifteen years.” Mentions regarding our years of experience, number of books sold, articles written, or students taught have also been updated to 2015 figures. Finally, we occasionally changed references from outmoded technologies such as “modems” to more modern ...