Ralph Kimball - The Kimball Group reader: relentlessly practical tools for data warehousing and business intelligence: remastered collection

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

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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Copyright 2016 by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-1-119-21631-5

ISBN: 978-1-119-23879-9 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-119-21659-9 (ebk)

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Ralph Kimball founded the Kimball Group. Since the mid-1980s, he has been the DW/BI industry's thought leader on the dimensional approach and has trained more than 20,000 IT professionals. Prior to working at Metaphor and founding Red Brick Systems, Ralph co-invented the Star workstation at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Ralph has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Margy Ross is President of the Kimball Group and Decision Works Consulting. She has focused exclusively on data warehousing and business intelligence since 1982. Margy has consulted with hundreds of clients and taught DW/BI best practices to tens of thousands. Prior to working at Metaphor and co-founding DecisionWorks Consulting, she graduated with a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University.

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Jim Minatel

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The Kimball Group

Warren Thornthwaite (19572014)

The Kimball Group lost Warren to a brain tumor in 2014. He wrote many insightful articles that appear in this Reader. All of us at the Kimball Group miss Warren dearlyhis intellect, curiosity, creativity, and most especially, his friendship and sense of humor. As any of you who met Warren will attest, he was truly one of a kind!

First, we want to thank the 33,000 subscribers to the Kimball Design Tips, and the uncounted numbers who have visited the Kimball Group website to peruse our archive. This book brings the remastered Design Tips and articles together in what we hope is a very usable form.

The Kimball Group Reader would not exist without the assistance of our business partners. Kimball Group members Bob Becker, Joy Mundy, and Warren Thornthwaite wrote many of the valuable articles and Design Tips included in the book. Thanks to Julie Kimball for her insightful comments. Thanks also to former Kimball Group member Bill Schmarzo for his contributions on analytic applications.

Thanks to our clients and students who have embraced, practiced, and validated the Kimball methods with us. We have learned as much from you as you have from us!

Jim Minatel, our executive editor at Wiley Publishing, project editor Tom Dinse, and the rest of the Wiley team have supported this project with skill, encouragement, and enthusiasm. It has been a pleasure to work with them.

To our families, thank you for your support over the twenty year span during which we wrote these Design Tips and articles. Julie Kimball and Scott Ross: We couldn't have done it without you! And, of course, thanks to our children, Sara Kimball Smith, Brian Kimball, and Katie Ross, who have grown into adults over the same time!

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.