Ralph Kimball

Ralph Kimball (Born 1945) is an author on the subject of data warehousing and business intelligence. He is widely regarded as one of the original architects of data warehousing and is known for long-term convictions that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His methodology, also known as dimensional modeling or the Kimball methodology, has become the de facto standard in the area of decision support. Compared with the approach of the other pioneering architect of data warehousing, Bill Inmon, Kimball's approach is often wrongly characterized as a bottom-up approach.

He writes the "Data Warehouse Designer" column for Intelligent Enterprise magazine and is the author of the best-selling books The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit and The Data Warehouse Toolkit, published by Wiley and Sons. He is listed in the Database Hall of Fame.

Career

After receiving a Ph.D. in 1972 from Stanford University in electrical engineering (specializing in man-machine systems), Ralph joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). At PARC Ralph participated in development of the Xerox Star Workstation, the first commercial product to use mice, icons and windows.

Kimball then became vice president of applications at Metaphor Computer Systems, a decision support software and services provider. He developed the Capsule Facility in 1982. The Capsule was a graphical programming technique which connected icons together in a logical flow, allowing a very visual style of programming for non-programmers. The Capsule was used to build reporting and analysis applications at Metaphor.

Kimball founded Red Brick Systems in 1986, serving as CEO until 1992. Red Brick Systems was acquired by Informix, which is now owned by IBM.^[1] Red Brick was known for its relational database optimized for data warehousing. Their claim to fame was the use of Indexes in order to achieve performance gains that amounted to almost 10 times that of other Database vendors at that time.

Ralph Kimball Associates incorporated in 1992 to provide data warehouse consulting and education.

The Kimball Group formalized existing long-term relationships between Ralph Kimball Associates, DecisionWorks Consulting, and InfoDynamics LLC.

Bibliography

• Kimball, Ralph; Joe Caserta (2008). The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit (2nd edition). New York: Wiley. ISBN 978-0-470-14977-5. 
• Kimball, Ralph; Joe Caserta (2004). The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley. ISBN 0-7645-6757-8. 
• Kimball, Ralph; Margy Ross (2002). The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling (Second Edition ed.). New York: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-20024-7. 
• Kimball, Ralph; Richard Merz (2000). The Data Webhouse Toolkit: Building the Web-Enabled Data Warehouse. Wiley. ISBN 0471376809. 
• Kimball, Ralph; et al. (1998). The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit. New York: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-25547-5. 

References

External links

• Kimball Group
• Differences of Opinion: The Kimball bus architecture and the Corporate Information Factory