Kimball's Data Warehouse Architecture: Evaluating the Challenges of Conformed Data against the Inmon Model

Abstract

In recent decades, driven by rapid data growth, organisations have faced the need to restructure their storage frameworks to efficiently handle queries requested by employees through available enterprise applications. Investigating this need involves examining the classic approaches of William H. Inmon, widely known as the father of Data Warehousing, and Ralph Kimball. Although both shared the same core concerns, Kimball later suggested an alternative architecture focused primarily on user needs. According to Ariyachandra and Watson, Inmon's "hub-and-spoke" architecture and Kimball's data bus framework featuring conformed dimensions stand out among alternative approaches. A comparison across these architectures highlights four key aspects: Information Quality, System Quality, Individual Impacts, and Organisational Impacts. Although Kimball and Inmon proposed contrasting solutions, they did not view each other as rivals. For instance, in one of the editions of the book "The Data Warehouse Toolkit", published by Kimball in 1996, the back cover features a note by Inmon stating that it is "one of the definitive books of our industry. If you take time to read only one professional book, make it this book.