Basics - Explain Bill Inmon's versus Ralph Kimball's Approach to Data Warehousing.

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Explain Bill Inmon's versus Ralph Kimball's Approach to Data Warehousing.

Bill Inmon vs Ralph Kimball
In the data warehousing field, we often hear about discussions on where a person / organization's philosophy falls into Bill Inmon's camp or into Ralph Kimball's camp. We describe below the difference between the two.
Bill Inmon's paradigm: Data warehouse is one part of the overall business intelligence system. An enterprise has one data warehouse, and data marts source their information from the data warehouse. In the data warehouse, information is stored in 3rd normal form.

Ralph Kimball's paradigm: Data warehouse is the conglomerate of all data marts within the enterprise. Information is always stored in the dimensional model. Kimball model also proposes the data warehouse bus architecture. This architecture is comprised of:
- A staging area (which can have an E/R or relationally designed 3NF design or flat file format), which cannot be accessed by an end-user of the data warehouse bus.
-The Data Warehouse Bus itself which includes several atomic data marts, several aggregated data marts and a personal data mart but no single or centralized data warehouse component.
The Data Warehouse Bus:
- Is dimensional;
- Contains transaction and summary data;
- Includes data marts, which have single subject or fact tables; and
- Can consist of multiple data marts in a single data base.

There is no right or wrong between these two ideas, as they represent different data warehousing philosophies. In reality, the data warehouse in most enterprises are closer to Ralph Kimball's idea. This is because most data warehouses started out as a departmental effort, and hence they originated as a data mart. Only when more data marts are built later do they evolve into a data warehouse.

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Last Update: November 19, 2007 Asked by: Pranay

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