Ralph Kimball is an author on the subject of data warehousing and business intelligence. He is one of the original architects of data warehousing and is known for long-term convictions that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His bottom-up methodology, also known as dimensional modeling or the Kimball methodology, is one of the two main data warehousing methodologies alongside Bill Inmon.
He is the principal author of the best-selling books The Data Warehouse Toolkit, The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit, The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit and The Kimball Group Reader, published by Wiley and Sons.