Ralph Kimball (ralph@kimballgroup.com) is known worldwide as an innovator, writer, educator, speaker and consultant in the field of data warehousing. He has remained steadfast in his long-term conviction that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His books on dimensional design techniques have become the all time best sellers in data warehousing. To date Ralph has written more than 100 articles and columns for Intelligent Enterprise and its predecessors, winning the Readers’ Choice Award five years in a row.

After receiving a Ph.D. in 1972 from Stanford in electrical engineering (specializing in man-machine systems), Ralph joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). At PARC Ralph co-invented the Xerox Star Workstation, the first commercial product to use mice, icons and windows.

Ralph then became vice president of applications at Metaphor Computer Systems, pioneering decision support software and services provider. As a hands-on manager, he developed the Capsule Facility in 1982. The Capsule was a graphical programming technique which connected icons together in a logical flow, allowing a very visual style of programming for non-programmers. The Capsule was used to build reporting and analysis applications at Metaphor.

Ralph founded Red Brick Systems in 1986, serving as CEO until 1992. Red Brick Systems, now owned by IBM, was known for its lightning fast relational database optimized for data warehousing. Ralph Kimball Associates incorporated in 1992 to provide data warehouse consulting and education.

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Margy Ross (margy@kimballgroup.com) is President of the Kimball Group. She has focused exclusively on decision support and data warehousing for more than twenty years, specializing in program/project strategy, business requirements analysis, and dimensional modeling. Since helping over 100 large organizations with their data warehouses, she remains convinced that business acceptance is the true measure of data warehouse success.

 

In addition to her consulting activities, Margy teaches the core Kimball University public classes and on-sites, both domestically and internationally. She co-authored The Data Warehouse Toolkit, 2nd Edition and The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit and regularly writes the Data Warehouse Designer column for Intelligent Enterprise.

Before launching the Kimball Group, Margy co-founded DecisionWorks Consulting, Inc. in 1994 with Bob Becker and Nancy Rinn. She had previously worked at Metaphor for ten years in a variety of consulting and management positions, including responsibility for Metaphor’s Customer Database Marketing business unit. Margy began her career with Arthur Andersen (now Accenture) Consulting. She graduated with a BS in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University.