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Allan Peda
E 
nterprise Application Integration
Y52.3250Prof. Aldrich Wright
 Allan PedaWeek 3, Kimball vs Inmon Data Warehouse Designs
Due Date: February 17, 2007, 10PM
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Allan Peda
Assignment
Describe a Business Problem or set of business problems that the your companyis trying to solve through a data warehouse or data mart. Compare and contrasttheKimballandInmonapproaches to data warehouse. Pick the one that best solves your business problem and why.
Problem Statement
The chosen business problem for this data warehouse is the determination of enrollment trends and subject interest within a university. This information derivedfrom these data is of tremendous value as it will be used to develop long termgrowth plans for the university including campus expansion, departmentalfunding levels and potential areas for enhanced research and developmentfunding. The initial focal point of this from a business unit perspective will bestudent registration data and library collection access records. This will defineinitial data feeds for ETL processing.
Problem Resolution
The chosen design is the relational (Inmon) database design as it is consideredto be quicker to develop, supports gradual expansion over time, is robust, flexibleand scalable. These attributes are considered more important than speed of implementation or raw performance. Kimballs multidimensional system (alsoknown as BUS for reasons discussed below) is considered more rigid becausewell defined conforming dimension and fact tables must be selected at the outsetof system development. The fact that the BUS architecture is modeled on theanalytical requirements of the end users creates difficulties when theserequirements change.
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Allan Peda
Relational Multidimensional
High Performance
Considered Quicker To Implement
Gradual Development Supported
Robust
Flexible
Scalable Performance
A more extensive discussion of each system is developed below.
Common Attributes among all data warehouse designs
No matter which design paradigm is used to approach the development of a datawarehouse design, the basic definition of a data warehouse remains the same. Itis a
subject oriented, integrated, nonvolatile and time variant collection of data insupport of management's decisions
. As such it can be viewed as one type of read intensive online analytical processing (OLAP) system which must integratea large amount of data derived from multiple business units. These data must beconsistent and summarized at the appropriate level of granularity, consequentlyan Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) step is necessary in drawing data from theoperational (OLTP) systems.
1
Both designs emphasize the importance of the ETLstep in developing
cleansed 
data which is loaded from a common IntegratedData Store. There must be no direct dependence on legacy or operational data.
The Multidimensional (Kimball) Approach
As noted earlier, the Kimball design is developed along the requirements of theend user. As such the data must be denormalized and refactored using a welldefined set of end user requirements. The underlying logical architecture is
not 
1This step is sometimes altered slightly with data transformation done primarily within thedatabase. This is referred to as Extract, Load and Transform (ELT).http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/linstedt/archives/2005/05/elt_and_etl_can.php
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