Modeling strategies and alternatives for data warehousing projects

Corporation and organizations are required to take great consideration while selecting data modeling strategies for data warehousing projects, to ensure the success of warehouse implementation. Data modeling approach, proposed by Inmon, envisions a data warehouse as an integrated database modeled by using the Entity0Relationship (ER) database modeling approach. It serves as a source of data for dimensionally modeled data for dimensionally modeled data marts and for many other analytically useful data sets. A different approach championed by Kimball views a data warehouse as a collection of dimensionally modeled data marts, where a set of commonly used dimensions known as conformed dimensions is designed. Organizations need to choose between several modeling methodologies based on the nature of their current and future analytical needs. The analysis of these needs can indicate them that, which method is most appropriate and suitable for their environments.