Michael L. Gonzales

Michael L. Gonzales

Michael Gonzales, is the Principal of Handson-BI, LLC. He offers clients practical knowledge of the challenges and critical success factors involved in building and managing data warehouses across a variety of industries and business applications. He uses a mentoring approach to data warehousing projects, guiding organizations from the initial development phase through to full implementation. Mr. Gonzales' expertise in the areas of data warehouse architecture, planning and design is distinguished by his ability to discover and understand the analytical business needs of the organization. He is a successful author, frequent speaker at industry user conferences, and conducts data warehouse courses throughout North America.

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Ralph Kimball

Ralph Kimball
From website kimballgroup.com

Ralph Kimball is known worldwide as an innovator, writer, educator, speaker and consultant in the field of data warehousing. He has remained steadfast in his long-term conviction that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His books on dimensional design techniques have become the all time best sellers in data warehousing. To date Ralph has written more than 100 articles and columns for Intelligent Enterprise and its predecessors, winning the Readers’ Choice Award five years in a row.

After receiving a Ph.D. in 1972 from Stanford in electrical engineering (specializing in man-machine systems), Ralph joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). At PARC Ralph co-invented the Xerox Star Workstation, the first commercial product to use mice, icons and windows.

Ralph then became vice president of applications at Metaphor Computer Systems, pioneering decision support software and services provider. As a hands-on manager, 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.

Ralph founded Red Brick Systems in 1986, serving as CEO until 1992. Red Brick Systems, now owned by IBM, was known for its lightning fast relational database optimized for data warehousing. Ralph Kimball Associates incorporated in 1992 to provide data warehouse consulting and education.

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William H. Inmon

William H. Inmon, "The Father of Data Warehousing"
From website inmoncif.com

Bill Inmon, world-renowned expert, speaker and author on data warehousing, is widely recognized as the "father of data warehousing." He is creator of the Corporate Information Factory and more recently, creator of the Government Information Factory. He has over 35 years of experience in database technology management and data warehouse design, and he is known globally for his seminars on developing data warehouses. He has been a keynote speaker for many major computing association and many industry conferences, seminars, and tradeshows.

As an author, Bill has written more than 650 articles on a variety of topics about building, using, and maintaining the data warehouse and the Corporate Information Factory. His works have been published in major computing journals including Data Management Review and The Business Intelligence Network where he continues to be a featured columnist. He has written 46 books, many of which have been translated into nine languages; one has sold over one-half million copies.

As entrepreneur, Bill founded and took public Prism Solutions in 1991. In 1995, Bill went on to found Pine Cone Systems, later named Ambeo. In 1999, Bill created this Web site to educate professionals and decision makers about data warehousing and the Corporate Information Factory. This popular and easy-to-use Web resource, http://www.inmoncif.com/, contains much of Mr. Inmon's written work and related material, including methodologies, technical white papers, articles, and data models. In 2003, Bill co-founded Inmon Data Systems, Inc. and created the Government Information Factory, an architectural blueprint for building government information systems. This "go-to" portal for government IT systems can be found at http://www.inmongif.com/.Bill consults with a large number of Fortune 1000 clients, offering data warehouse design and database management services. He has worked for American Management Systems, Inc. and Coopers & Lybrand. Bill received his Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Yale University, and his Master of Science degree in Computer Science from New Mexico State University. He makes his home in Colorado.

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Data Warehouse Definition

Data warehouse
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A data warehouse is the main repository of an organization's historical data, its corporate memory. It contains the raw material for management's decision support system. The critical factor leading to the use of a data warehouse is that a data analyst can perform complex queries and analysis, such as data mining, on the information without slowing down the operational systems.



Bill Inmon, an early and influential practitioner, has formally defined a data warehouse in the following terms; it is
subject-oriented, meaning that the data in the database is organized so that all the data elements relating to the same real-world event or object are linked together;
time-variant, meaning that the changes to the data in the database are tracked and recorded so that reports can be produced showing changes over time;
non-volatile, meaning that data in the database is never over-written or deleted, once committed, the data is static, read-only, but retained for future reporting; and
integrated, meaning that the database contains data from most or all of an organization's operational applications, and that this data is made consistent.
A data warehouse might be used to find the day of the week on which a company sold the most widgets in May 1992, or how employee sick leave the week before the winter break differed between California and New York from 2001-2005.
While operational systems are optimized for simplicity and speed of modification (see OLTP) through heavy use of database normalization and an entity-relationship model, the data warehouse is optimized for reporting and analysis (online analytical processing, or OLAP). Frequently data in data warehouses are heavily denormalised, summarised or stored in a dimension-based model. This is not always required to achieve acceptable query response times, however.

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