KLE: Comunicación

The arenas of disagreement are more interesting than the arenas of agreement. Some of the main differences between the Kimball approach and the Inmon approach are:

The long-term or short-term nature of the solution. If what you want is speed of development and good short term results, Kimball is the way to go. If you want a long-term architectural solution, then the Inmon approach is the way to go.

If you want a tactical solution, then Kimball is the way to go. If you want a strategic solution, then Inmon is the way to go.

The Kimball approach is very fragile. Whenever requirements undergo significant change, the Kimball solution is “brittle.” Instead of being able to do repair to star schemas and fact tables, often times the entire table infrastructure has to be discarded and rewritten. In the Inmon approach, when it comes to changing requirements, work still has to be done. But when it comes to the alteration of granular, integrated, relational structures of data, indeed, long-term maintenance can be done to those structures with a minimum of fuss. Once properly built, having to rewrite and redesign the Inmon architecture is almost unheard of.

In the Kimball approach, there is no single version of the truth, no system of record. In the Inmon approach, at the integrated granular level, there is a carefully crafted single version of the truth. In fact, the reason why the Inmon approach is more difficult and slower to build is because of the need for the construction of this single version of the truth at the most granular level of detail of data in the corporation.

The Kimball approach produces results in a short amount of time. The Inmon approach produces results over a longer period of time.

The Kimball architecture does not produce a foundation that can be built on over time as requirements change. The Inmon architecture does produce an architecture that can be built upon over time as requirements change.

The Kimball architecture focuses on a narrow set of infrastructure components such as tables and indexes. The Inmon architecture is far more robust than the Kimball architecture including such things as unstructured, textual data, near line storage, archival storage and processing the tight integration of metadata into the infrastructure. In a word, the infrastructure found in the Inmon approach is far, far more robust than the architecture offered by Kimball. The Inmon approach recognizes the need to manage data over its life cycle in the data warehouse, the need for inclusion and integration of both structured and unstructured data within the data warehouse, the need to design and build the data warehouse with an ever-changing probability of access of data in mind, and the need to tightly integrate metadata in its many different forms into the data warehouse.

These then are some of the major differences between the different architectures. I have tried to represent the Kimball approach as best I can. I am sure that Ralph can represent his architecture much better than I can. At any time that Ralph is ready to come forth and have a public discussion at a seminar, conference or other focused public arena – in any format that Ralph chooses – I am ready for a public debate and disclosure.

Bill Inmon - Bill is universally recognized as the father of the data warehouse. He has more than 36 years of database technology management experience and data warehouse design expertise. He has published more than 40 books and 1,000 articles on data warehousing and data management, and his books have been translated into nine languages. He is known globally for his data warehouse development seminars and has been a keynote speaker for many major computing associations. Bill can be reached at 303-681-6772 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 303-681-6772 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

< Previous Page 1|2

Data Warehousing: Kimball vs. Inmon (By Inmon)