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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Kimball was founder and CEO of Red Brick Systems [dataversity.net] in the '80s, a pioneer in the field of analytic relational databases. He founded the Kimball Group in 1992 and published The Data Warehouse Toolkit [barnesandnoble.com] , an influential guide to architecting and building a data warehouse (a database or collection of data marts which ingests records from a corporation/organization's various operational databases on a continuing basis, with a common schema or set of schemas facilitating ad hoc queries by business executives and marketing personnel for analytic purposes).

Kimball was noted for his advocacy of denormalized schemas that deliberately violated E.F. Codd's standards for "third normal form" [essentialsql.com], arguing that a collection of "star" schemas would lead to more convenient and efficient query processing [kimballgroup.com] for users. By contrast, his rival author and consultant Bill Inmon recommended [nagesh.com] that data warehouses respect third normal form.

Kimball's website note that the consultancy has dissolved as of December, 2015 [kimballgroup.com]; the retirement had been in the works [morningbiznews.com] for months.

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