Re:The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube (2020)
by cedricd on Monday July 05, 2021 @08:38PM
(#27743186)
This isn't widely known, but activity schema[1] is aiming for this space (disclosure - I co-founded the company supporting it).
It's a modeling approach that separates data modeling from data querying -- meaning that once data is modeled, it can answer any number of questions. The base building blocks of the data model can be combined at query time without having to figure out explicit foreign key joins.
Yeah, that would be my disagreement as well.
Sure, some of Kimball might be obsoleted by modern technology. But I don't think the point of Kimball is cubes, and even if it was, what better is there?
I'd be really interested in what else is there, that is more modern and suited to the modern world.
Data Vault? That probably isn't it, most of all because it's all about the "platform to build you Kimball on" but not the actual business modelling. (But the parts about Metrics Vault and Quality Vault and the "service stuff" are really good.)
Anchor Modelling? That one seems, looking by 2021 eyes, like a way to implement columnar storage and schema-on-read in MS SQL Server using store procedures ... which is probably not actually a good idea.
Puppini Bridge aka. Unified Star Schema seems like interesting concept, especially in self-service space. But even it's proponents warn you it doesn't scale performance-wise and also it is kind of incremental change on Kimball. (But the way the bridge table is kinda adjacency matrix of graph of your objects tickles my inner computer scientist fancy)
So really, what else is there?