Kimball University to return to South Africa

Susan Andre2001

Sagent Technology will again host and sponsor Ralph Kimball University's third successive visit to South Africa in September 2001 to present the hugely popular data warehousing course. Last year's course attracted over 80 students and the demand from the Cape Town market has resulted in the course being scheduled this year in both Cape Town and Johannesburg.

"Sagent's involvement with the Kimball University is primarily to facilitate Sagent's drive to educate the local audience about the aspects of Business Intelligence," says Sagent's Managing Director, Susan Andre. " Those involved with data warehouse construction find themselves being bombarded with conflicting ideas on the "how to" without the benefit of practical application of the principles that should apply to data warehouse design.

The three-day workshop in dimensional data warehousing is aimed at intermediate to experienced data warehouse designers and is focussed on providing a practical understanding of the current state of the art in dimensional modeling, developing dimensional solutions for some of the most complex customer intelligence requirements and to handle the integration of Clickstream data within the data warehouse.

The majority of the course is devoted to challenging design problems having to do firstly with dimension tables then fact tables. Lawrence Corr, who presents this year's Kimball University class will case study a number of designs he and Ralph Kimball have seen in their consulting practice. Most of these situations have reasonable solutions, but some modeling situations are intrinsically messy, and some kind of design compromise is necessary to achieve a pragmatic solution.

Lawrence Corr has worked extensively in decision support and data warehousing since 1984. He has specialized in dimensional modeling and data warehouse tool selection, advising data warehouse projects in Europe, USA, the Middle East and Africa. He has designed dimensional data warehouses for clients in multiple industries including insurance, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, engineering, manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services and retail. Lawrence launched DecisionOne Consulting in 1999 to provide dimensional data warehouse consulting and training. In 2000 he was selected by Ralph Kimball to become a Ralph Kimball Associate, teaching for Kimball University worldwide. Lawrence holds a Bachelor of Technology in Computing from Bradford University, UK. Kimball University courses will be conducted in Johannesburg from the 5th to the 7th September at the Unisys Auditorium, Sunninghill and in Cape Town from 10th to the 12th September at Belmont Square Conference Centre, Rondebosch.

To book, contact Sibel via e-mail sibel@sagent.co.za, or telephonically (011) 881 5541.