Kathryn Avery has been a DBA with a nationwide retail chain (Big Chain) for the past 6 years. She has recently been asked to lead the development of Big Chain’s first data warehouse. The project has the sponsorship of senior management and the CIO. The rationale for developing the data warehouse is to advance the reporting systems, particularly in sales and marketing, and, in the longer term, to improve Big Chain’s CRM. Kathryn has been to a Data Warehousing Institute conference and has been doing some reading, but she is still mystified about development methodologies. She knows there are two groups - EDW (Inmon) and architected DMs (Kimball)—that have equally robust features.

Initially, she believed that the two methodologies were extremely dissimilar, but as she has examined them more carefully, she isn’t so certain. Kathryn has a number of questions that she would like answered:

a. What are the real differences between the methodologies?

b. What factors are important in selecting a particular methodology?

c. What should be her next steps in thinking about a methodology?