The 10 Essential Rules of Dimensional Modeling
Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it. A student attending one of Kimball Group’s recent onsite dimensional modeling classes asked me for a list of...
View ArticleSix Key Decisions for ETL Architectures
Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it. This article describes six key decisions that must be made while crafting the ETL architecture for a...
View ArticleIndustry Standard Data Models Fall Short
Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it. Industry-standard data models are an appealing concept at first blush, but they aren’t the time savers they...
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The Matrix: Revisited
With the current industry buzz focused on master data management (MDM), it’s time to revisit one of the most critical elements of the Kimball method. Back in 1999, Ralph Kimball wrote an Intelligent...
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Keep to the Grain in Dimensional Modeling
When developing fact tables, aggregated data is NOT the place to start. To avoid “mixed granularity” woes including bad and overlapping data, stick to rich, expressive, atomic-level data that’s...
View ArticleWhite Paper: An Architecture for Data Quality
In this white paper, Ralph proposes a comprehensive architecture for capturing data quality events, as well as measuring and ultimately controlling data quality in the data warehouse. This scalable...
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Subsystems of ETL Revisited
The Kimball Group has been exposed to hundreds of successful data warehouses. Careful study of these successes has revealed a set of extract, transformation, and load (ETL) best practices. We first...
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Slowly Changing Dimensions
The notion of time pervades every corner of the data warehouse. Most of the fundamental measurements we store in our fact tables are time series, which we carefully annotate with time stamps and...
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Slowly Changing Dimensions, Part 2
The owner of the data warehouse must decide how to respond to the changes in the descriptions of dimensional entities like Employee, Customer, Product, Supplier, Location and others. In 30 years of...
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Fact Tables
Fact tables are the foundation of the data warehouse. They contain the fundamental measurements of the enterprise, and they are the ultimate target of most data warehouse queries. There is no point in...
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