Approaches to data warehousing
There are two popular approaches to designing a data warehouse, namely the normalized approach by Bill Inmon and the dimensional approach by Ralph Kimball. In this section, we’ll explain the two different approaches further in detail.
Normalized approach by Bill Inmon
The first approach we would like to introduce is the normalized approach by Bill Inmon. Bill Inmon was one of the first people to define the term data warehousing and defined it as a “subject-oriented, nonvolatile, integrated, time-variant collection of data in support of management’s decisions.” This means a data warehouse focuses on subjects, such as products and customers, and stores historical data for an indefinite time.
The Inmon design approach constructs a logical model for each subject that includes all relevant attributes, relationships, dependencies, and affiliations. This logical model uses a normalized structure (3NF) to minimize data redundancy...
