What is the main difference between Inmon and Kimball philosophies of data warehousing?
Emily Wong
Updated on March 01, 2026
What is the main difference between Inmon and Kimball philosophies of data warehousing?
Kimball uses the dimensional model such as star schemas or snowflakes to organize the data in dimensional data warehouse while Inmon uses ER model in enterprise data warehouse. Inmon only uses dimensional model for data marts only while Kimball uses it for all data.
What is Inmon data warehouse?
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.
What are the three datawarehouse models?
From the architecture point of view, there are three data warehouse models: the enterprise warehouse, the data mart, and the virtual warehouse. Enterprise warehouse: An enterprise warehouse collects all of the information about subjects spanning the entire organization.
Is Kimball data warehouse still relevant?
So, is Kimball still relevant in a modern DW architecture? It depends, but for most data warehouse the answer is… yes, but the reason it is not performance anymore. Despite a wide denormalised table has improved performance; it can be difficult to maintain.
What is Inmon model?
Inmon approach of designing a Dataware house was introduced by Bill Inmon. This approach starts with corporate data model. This model recognizes key areas and also takes care of customer, product, and vendor. This model serves for creation of a detailed logical model which is used for major operations.
What is Inmon approach?
The Inmon approach is referred to as the top-down or data-driven approach, whereby we start from the data warehouse and break it down into data marts, specialized as needed to meet the needs of different departments within the organization, such as finance, accounting, HR etc.
Which is better Kimball vs Inmon?
For designing, there are two most common architectures named Kimball and Inmon but question is which one is better, which one serves user at low redundancy….Difference Between Kimball and Inmon :
| Parameters | Kimball | Inmon |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | It has iterative steps and is cost effective. | Initial cost is huge and development cost is low. |
Is Kimball normalized?
The Kimball Approach. Here the comes the key difference: the model proposed by Kimball for data warehousing—the dimensional model—is not normalized. The fundamental concept of dimensional modeling is the star schema. In the star schema, there is typically a fact table surrounded by many dimensions.
Is qlikview a data warehouse?
Qlik is based on in-memory technology to create internal files that can function as a regular database-like data warehouse. They like to consider it as a reporting tool that “looks good”, and position Qlik as a simple in-memory BI software.
What is Dwh architecture?
A data warehouse architecture is a method of defining the overall architecture of data communication processing and presentation that exist for end-clients computing within the enterprise. Such applications gather detailed data from day to day operations.
Who are the fathers of data warehousing?
Bill Inmon, the recognized father of the data warehousing concept, defines a data warehouse as a subject-orientated, integrated, time variant, non-volatile collection of data in support of management’s decision-making process.
What is a Kimball dimensional model?
The concept of Dimensional Modelling was developed by Ralph Kimball and consists of “fact” and “dimension” tables. A dimensional model in data warehouse is designed to read, summarize, analyze numeric information like values, balances, counts, weights, etc. in a data warehouse.
What is the difference between Inmon and Kimball data warehouse model?
In the hybrid data model, the Inmon method is used to create a dimensional data warehouse model of the data warehouse. In contrast, the Kimball method is followed to develop data marts using the star schema.
What is the difference between kimkimball and Inmon?
Kimball uses the dimensional model such as star schemas or snowflakes to organize the data in dimensional data warehouse while Inmon uses ER model in enterprise data warehouse. Inmon uses data marts as physical separation from enterprise data warehouse and they are built for departmental uses.
What is kimkimball’s model?
Kimball’s model follows a bottom-up approach. The Data Warehouse (DW) is provisioned from Datamarts (DM) as and when they are available or required. The Datamarts are sourced from OLTP systems are usually relational databases in Third normal form (3NF). The Data Warehouse which is central to the model is a de-normalized star schema.
How to design data marts in Kimball?
To design data marts, the team has to be familiar with each functional unit. Kimball, on the other hand, requires a general team to implement. The resources involved need to know how to work with ER modelling without the need to decouple them into various data marts. We need enterprise-wide data integration with Inmon based data warehouse.