The Kimball Group is world famous for their dimensional modeling principles, and training of developers worldwide. Founded by industry pioneer Ralph Kimball, Kimball Group consultants specialized in data warehouse design and business intelligence advisory services. Before joining Kimball Group, Joy worked at Microsoft.
Joy first talks about building dimensional models in general and then how to apply them to the OLAP environment.
“We all want to be getting information out to the business user community and the best way to do that is with Cube and the dimensional model that underlies it.”
Joy also emphasized the importance of consulting with business users during the design process. “Get as close to the business users as possible and make them part of the design team,” she advised.
Joy Mundy: We tend not to talk enough to the business users
“The biggest problem I think is that we tend not to talk enough to the business users about what their requirements are and instead build our designs from a technology perspective rather than from a business perspective. It’s a very old problem, there is nothing new here.”
According to Joy, “The problem exists mainly because we, the people who are in charge of building these systems are technical people because it’s, there is a lot of technology involved and a lot of moving parts that are difficult to put together, but the underlying problem is a business problem and it’s out of the normal comfort zone and skill set of the technological people who are building the solutions.”
Joy Mundy focused on data warehousing and business intelligence at the recently closed Kimball Group. She first worked at Stanford University, where she helped build a data warehouse for the university’s administration. At Microsoft, she worked on the SQL Server product development team and the BI Best Practices team. Learn about Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing at DesignMind.