Another guest post, this time from my colleague and friend Mark Beyer.
My name is Mark Beyer, and I am the “father of the logical data warehouse”. So, what does that mean? First, if like any father, you are not willing to address your ancestry with full candor you will lose your place in the universe and wither away without making a meaningful contribution. As an implementer in the field, I was a student and practitioner of both Inmon and Kimball. I learned as much or more from my clients and my colleagues during multiple implementations as I did from studying any methodology. My Gartner colleagues challenged my concepts and helped hammer them into a comprehensive and complete concept. Simply put, I was willing to consider DNA contributions from anyone and anywhere, but through a form of unnatural selection, persisted in choosing to include the good genes and actively removing the undesirable elements.
I need time to digest LDW (source to access makes sense) but in my opinion the biggest challenge is to teach people how to make sense of the data (users/developers), how to efficiently use it without misleading and how to build really functional reports/dashboard.
I see lots of reports/dashboards and there is really very small % that I would consider to be of high quality. There is still very long way to understanding key data.