“We acknowledge that organizations have successfully constructed DW/BI based on the approaches advocated by others… Rather than encouraging more consternation over our philosophical differences, the industry would be far better off devoting energy to ensure that our DW/BI deliverables are broadly accepted by the business to make better, more informed decisions.”

– Ralph Kimball

We see this a lot; teams spend all their time in dead-lock deciding on which approach, project-methodology and architecture to choose and then just go and over-engineer something that is of little use to the business anyway.

It is a better approach to keep things simple and deliver early ensuring the solution is consistent, accurate and maintainable.  There is no point in making sure your data-mart can scale to 1TB in size if no-one is going to use it.