The Father of Data Warehousing: Bill Inmon

It is important to learn about not only those who came before us but especially those who either set the standard or are the best at what they do. Bill Inmon falls into both of these categories.

About Bill

Best known as the “Father of Data Warehousing”, Bill Inmon has become the most prolific and well-known author worldwide in the data warehousing and business intelligence arena. Bill has been a monthly columnist with the Business Intelligence Network, EIM Institute and Data Management Review. In 2007, Bill was named by Computerworld as one of the “Ten IT People Who Mattered in the Last 40 Years” of the computer profession.

Having 35 years of experience in database technology and data warehouse design, he is known globally for his seminars on developing data warehouses and information architectures. Bill has been a keynote speaker in demand for numerous computing associations, industry conferences and trade shows. (Source: inmoncif)

Bill Inmon wrote the first book, held the first conference (with Arnie Barnett), wrote the first column in a magazine and was the first to offer classes in data warehousing. Bill Inmon created the accepted definition of what a data warehouse is – a subject oriented, nonvolatile, integrated, time variant collection of data in support of management’s decisions. Compared with the approach of the other pioneering architect of data warehousing, Ralph Kimball, Inmon’s approach is often characterized as a top-down approach.

Bill’s Data Warehouse

The data warehouse is one part of the overall business intelligence system. An enterprise has one data warehouse, and data marts source their information from the data warehouse. In the data warehouse, information is stored in 3rd normal form. Inmon’s philosophy recommends to start with building a large centralized enterprise-wide data warehouse, followed by several satellite databases to serve the analytical needs of departments (later known as “data marts”). Hence, his approach has received the “Top Down” title.(Source: nagesh)

Inmon argues that once the data is in a relational model, it will attain the enterprise-wide consistency which makes it easier to spawn-off the data-marts in dimensional-models. Inmon has definitely foreseen the hurdles and issues with data management through integration. Inmon presented them in a very academic manner that cannot be ignored. Several failures in the market can be attributed due to ignoring what Inmon has warned about.

Bill Inmon has published more than 40 books and 1,000 articles on data warehousing and data management. A selection:

• 1981. Effective Data Base Design. Prentice Hall, 1981
• 1986. Information systems architecture : a system developer’s primer. Prentice-Hall.
• 1986. The dynamics of data base. With Thomas J. Bird, Jr. Prentice-Hall.
• 1988. Information engineering for the practitioner : putting theory into practice. Prentice Hall.
• 1992. Rdb/VMS: Developing the Data Warehouse. With Chuck Kelley, QED, 19921321abhish
• 1992. Building the Data Warehouse. 1st Edition. Wiley and Sons
• 1998. Corporate Information Factory. With Claudia Imhoff and Ryan Sousa. John Wiley and Sons
• 2000. Exploration Warehousing: Turning Business Information into Business Opportunity. With R. H. Terdeman, John Wiley and Sons
• 2007. Business Metadata. With Bonnie Oneil and Lowell Fryman. Elsevier Press 2007
• 2007. Tapping Into Unstructured Data. With Tony Nesavich. Prentice Hall, 2007
• 2008. DW 2.0 – Architecture for the Next Generation of Data Warehousing. With Derek Strauss and Genia Neushloss, Elsevier Press, 2008