Ralph Kimball is the founder of the Kimball Group and Kimball University where he has taught data warehouse design to more than 10,000 students. He is known for the best selling series of data warehouse "Toolkit" books. He started with a Ph.D. in man-machine systems from Stanford in 1973 and has spent the last 34 years designing systems for end users that are simple and fast. You can reach him at ralph@kimballgroup.com.

Exploit Your Fact Tables
January 29, 2009 Clean fact table designs have application in the front room and back room

Fact Tables
November 5, 2008 Fact tables contain the fundamental measurements of the enterprise, and they are the ultimate target of most data warehouse...

Judge Your BI Tool through Your Dimensions
October 29, 2008 Dimensions are the entry points, the labels, the groupings, the drill-down paths and ultimately the texture of the data...

Slowly Changing Dimensions, Types 2 and 3
September 22, 2008 Only three responses to changes in the descriptions of dimensions (slowly changing dimensions) are necessary

Slowly Changing Dimensions
August 21, 2008 In this month’s column and the next, I’ll show how to implement the three basic types of SCDs.

Drill Down to Ask Why, Part 2
July 23, 2008 In this month’s column, I’ll continue with this example and explore how to implement analytic capabilities to...

Drill Down to Ask Why, Part 1
June 19, 2008 Boiled down to its essence, the real purpose of a data warehouse is to be the perfect platform for decision-making.

Essential Steps for the Integrated Enterprise Data Warehouse, Part 2
April 11, 2008 This article describes what the dimension manager and fact provider do, and how to configure business intelligence tools to...

Essential Steps for the Integrated Enterprise Data Warehouse, Part 1
March 17, 2008 This article provides guidance to what an integrated EDW is and what design elements are needed to achieve integration.

Dividing the World
February 20, 2008 Your design goal is ease of use, not elegance. In the final step of building dimensional models that are intended for...

Dimensional Perspectives
January 17, 2008 Dimensional modeling is an old discipline, dating from the late 1970s when ACNielsen introduced its In*Fact syndicated data...

Data Wrangling
January 3, 2008 In this third column, we are ready to design the first stage of the data pipeline leading from the operational sources to the...

Set Your Boundaries
November 29, 2007 Setting clear boundaries will help manage expectations.

Resist the Urge to Start Coding
October 29, 2007 The most important first step in designing a data warehouse/business intelligence system, paradoxically, is to stop.

An Architecture for Data Quality
October 1, 2007 Data warehousing guru Ralph Kimball proposes a comprehensive architecture for capturing data quality events as well as...