Kimball KungFu – let’s not loose it!

So doing a Kimball course this week in Sydney Australia and Bob and Ralph dropped a bit of a bombshell. In the next few years it’s likely that the 6 founders will all take a well earned retirement, when that happens they will role up the company and it will cease to exist. I find this very sad indeed and essentially end of an era. The Kimball group have contributed immensely to the subjects of data warehousing, dimensional modeling and ETL, over 3 decades. What’s great about the Kimball Group is that they have stayed true to being vendor independent, extremely rare in this day and age, especially in BI/DW space.

So what is too be done here? I propose they establish a Kimball community site and appoint a number of individual master practitioners to maintain and contribute to it. I’d suggest that these practitioners be limited to just 6 people at any one time and all be published and recognised book authors in the space of BI/DW. Think it makes sense to limit the numbers of core practitioners so that changes suggested by the community are distilled and tested before being added to the methodology. Practitioners should be vendor agnostic, a pretty hard ask but totally in line with the Kimball methodology. Of course community members could over time take on the roles of the 6 master practitioners if one of them wanted to step down, but would need to agree up front a willingness to spend time work with the new practitioner to help establish them.

Further the Kimball Group should start an exam certification program so as to insure that all practitioners using the Kimball method demonstrate their understanding of it. Monies for certification would go towards funding and keeping a vital community alive and well and ideally drum up new business in the space. Not to mention making the goodwill value of the company worth considerably more. Of course the worst possible thing that could happen would be for the Kimball Method to be owned by a vendor, that would of course spell a fairly quick kiss of death to an amazing and highly needed brand.

I’d love to hear thoughts from others on this as I really think it’s possible that we loose an extremely valuable practice over time. It’s a little like a Kimball KungFu school, you don’t want to loose the style or the history and contribution of a group of people that have spent their lives contributing to techniques that have saved our bacon countless times. Incidentally KungFu roughly translates to “Skill achieved through hard work”

ETL with Feedback

One of the things I’ve never really understood in data warehouse architectures is why there isn’t a feedback loop from Warehouse systems back to the operational source in other word Extract Transform Load and Feedback. Not saying the goal of most Warehouse projects isn’t to answer questions across the spectrum of operational systems. However data cleaning and profiling can detect many source system data issues and although validation reporting can pick up and address these issues it’s a pity there isn’t a feedback loop that provides source systems with fixes to their systems of considerable benefit to those sources. Of course this isn’t always possible for systems that are in archived state but for systems that are still active one would think that would be very beneficial.

I’m certain I’m not the only one to think this way so wondering if anyone has invented a system that provides updates back to sources so that issues can be addressed there?

Performance Point Services – where are you!

Random thought of the day but what has happened to SharePoint Performance Point Services in SP2013, seems like the SQL guys should jump in and spruce it up a little again…maybe PowerView with decomposition tree …but yeah needs a facelift, annotation information in the dashboards is something SharePoint BI badly needs…not everything in Excel…though mostly 🙂