Reflections on the Kimball Data Warehouse "Bible": Time for a New Testament?

While preparing for a seminar course I'm giving on Data Warehousing this Fall, I reviewed the The Data Warehouse Toolkit (2nd Ed) by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross (the Amazon.com link is here). Long considered the Bible of data warehouse design, this book offers several schema design strategies for relational database OLTP engines used for data warehouse applications. The Data Warehouse Toolkit was a seminal contribution to the field of data warehousing when it was first published in 1996, differentiating the needs of warehouses from operational stores and inventing "dimensional modeling" as a schema design methodology. But in reading this text 10 years after it was first published, I found that it revealed OLTP database engines to be ill-suited to meet the needs of data warehousing applications.

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