International data warehousing guru Ralph Kimball will be in SA for a one-day business intelligence (BI) event.
Themed "Straight Talk on Practical BI Techniques for Proven Results", it will be held at Montecasino, Johannesburg, on 13 November.
Kimball is known worldwide as an innovator, educator and consultant in the data warehousing field. He will highlight his data warehouse methodologies and suggested best BI practices at the event.
Hosted by Sybase SA's BIPractice, in association with ITWeb, the event is targeted at business and IT management. It will kick off with a keynote address by Kimball, who will give an engineer's perspective of how to effectively build platforms for BI systems that are simple, fast, relevant and cost-effective.
There will then be a showcase of case studies and a Q&A session with Kimball. The afternoon will include a three-hour interactive workshop, entitled "Best Practices for Building the Data Warehouse". During this session, he will introduce classic best practices for building effective data warehouses and demonstrate how the most important data warehouse subject areas are implemented using proven techniques.
Kimball 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 bestsellers in data warehousing. To date, Kimball has written 100 articles and columns for Intelligent Enterprise and its predecessors, winning the Readers' Choice Award five years in a row.
After receiving a PhD, in 1972, from Stanford in electrical engineering, he joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre. Here he co-invented the Xerox Star Workstation, the first commercial product to use mice, icons and windows. Kimball then became vice-president of applications at Metaphor Computer Systems, where he developed the Capsule Facility, in 1982.
The Capsule was a graphical programming technique, which connected icons together in a logical flow, allowing a visual style of programming for non-programmers. The Capsule was used to build reporting and analysis applications at Metaphor.
Kimball founded Red Brick Systems, in 1986, serving as CEO until 1992. Red Brick Systems, now owned by IBM, was known for its fast relational database, optimised for data warehousing. Ralph Kimball Associates incorporated in 1992 to provide data warehouse consulting and education.
"Business intelligence and data warehousing has reached a new level of maturity, both as a discipline and a technology market," says Estelle de Beer, practice manager at Sybase SA's BIPractice.
"Increasing regulatory imperatives, cost pressures and a desire to optimise business processes and streamline the enterprise make BI/DW one of the top 10 critical CIO priorities, according to a Gartner survey."
De Beer adds that, because of Kimball's achievements in BI as a global discipline, it made perfect sense to Sybase SA's BIPractice to make this investment to extend his BI expertise to IT and business management in SA.
Contact Sybase on (011) 202-1000 or jenny@sybase.co.za.
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