Ralph Kimball (born July 18, 1944) is an author on the subject of

data warehousing In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integr ...

and

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical ...

. He is one of the original architects of

and is known for long-term convictions that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His bottom-up methodology, also known as

dimensional modeling Dimensional modeling (DM) is part of the '' Business Dimensional Lifecycle'' methodology developed by Ralph Kimball which includes a set of methods, techniques and concepts for use in data warehouse design. The approach focuses on identifying t ...

or the Kimball methodology, is one of the two main data warehousing methodologies alongside Bill Inmon. He is the principal author of the best-selling books ''The Data Warehouse Toolkit'', ''The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit'', ''The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit'' and ''The Kimball Group Reader'', published by Wiley and Sons.

Career

After receiving a Ph.D. in 1973 from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

in electrical engineering (specializing in man-machine systems), Ralph joined the

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Stamf ...

(PARC). At PARC Ralph was a principal designer of the

Xerox Star The Xerox Star workstation, officially named Xerox 8010 Information System, is the first commercial personal computer to incorporate technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based ...

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 A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization (usually mid and higher management) and h ...

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. Red Brick was known for its

relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relati ...

optimized for data warehousing. Their claim to fame was the use of bit-map Indexes in order to achieve performance gains that amounted to almost 10 times that of other Database vendors at that time. Since 1992, Kimball has provided data warehouse consulting and education through various companies such as Ralph Kimball Associates and the Kimball Group.

Bibliography

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References

External links

Kimball Group

Differences of Opinion: The Kimball bus architecture and the Corporate Information Factory
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kimball, Ralph Business intelligence Data warehousing Technical writers Living people 1944 births Scientists at PARC (company)