[BOOK REVIEW] The Data Warehouse Toolkit by Ralph Kimball/Alternative DW/BI architectures
Independent Data Mart Architecture
With this approach, analytic data is deployed on a departmental basis without concern to sharing and integrating information across the enterprise.
This approach is not recommended by the author, however is favored by companies since it is of least resistance for fast development at relatively low cost. According the author, this approach:
results in myriad standalone point solutions that perpetuate incompatible views of the organization’s performance, resulting in unnecessary organizational debate and reconciliation.
Hub-and-Spoke Corporate Information Factory Inmon Architecture
The special aspect of this design is the mandatory implementation of normalized Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW).
The process of normalization does not technically speak to integration. Normalization simply creates physical tables that implement many-to-one relationships. Integration, on the other hand, requires that inconsistencies arising from separate sources be resolved. Separate incompatible database sources can be normalized to the hilt without addressing integration. The Kimball architecture based on conformed dimensions reverses this logic and focuses on resolving data inconsistencies without explicitly requiring normalization.
Suggested used for organizations who often have business users accessing the EDW repository due to its level of detail or data availability timeliness.
