The fathers of the data warehouse

We guess we shouldn't tell you about the data warehousing concept without first telling you who is widely recognized as the creator or father of the modern data warehouse.

Bill Inmon is a world-renowned expert on data warehousing and is also widely recognized as the Father of Data Warehousing. With 35+ years of experience in the Information Technology field and more specifically database technology management and data warehouse design, Bill has been a highly sought after speaker for many major computing associations and industry conferences, seminars, and tradeshows.

Another widely recognized name in the data warehousing arena is Ralph Kimball. Ralph Kimball is an author on the subject of data warehousing and business intelligence and received a Ph.D. in 1972 from Stanford University in Electrical Engineering specializing in man-machine systems. He is widely regarded as the Guru of Data Warehousing and is known for long-term convictions that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. Ralph's methodology is also known as dimensional modeling or the Kimball methodology.

The similarities between Mr. Inmon and Mr. Kimball are many and so are the differences. The following paradigm statements illustrate just how Mr. Inmon and Mr. Kimball are perceived in the world of Data Warehousing.

Bill Inmon's paradigm: The enterprise data warehouse is one part of the overall business intelligence system. An enterprise should have just one data warehouse and one to many data marts. The data marts then source their information from the data warehouse. In the data warehouse, information is stored in third normal form.

Ralph Kimball's paradigm: The enterprise data warehouse is the conglomerate of all data marts within the enterprise. Information is always stored in the dimensional model.

There is no right way or wrong way between either of these two ideas. They each represent different data warehousing philosophies. In reality, the data warehouse philosophy used in most enterprises is closer to Ralph Kimball's idea. This is because most data warehouses started out as department level efforts, and as such they originated as an activity specific data mart. Only when more data marts are built later do they evolve into a data warehouse.