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Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, 7th January 2026

The origins of data warehousing are often pinned to the late 1980s, when the term “business data warehouse” first appeared in an influential IBM Systems Journal article by researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy. I was based in Birmingham at that time, and I also wrote a similar foundational document on Information Centres for Sperry Univac.
Yet, as with many technological breakthroughs, the story is far richer and older than the conventional narrative suggests. The foundational components of what we now recognise as a data warehouse were quietly taking shape as early as the 1960s, driven by the need to organise, integrate, and analyse growing volumes of business information in an era of punch cards, magnetic tape, and the first mainframes.

The journey begins in the mid-20th century with the shift from physical ledgers to electronic storage. Magnetic tape replaced punch cards in the 1960s, enabling sequential bulk data handling, while the arrival of disk storage introduced random access and greater flexibility. Early precursors emerged in joint research between General Mills and Dartmouth College, where the concepts of dimensions and facts, core to dimensional modelling, were first articulated. By the 1970s, market-research firms such as ACNielsen and IRI were building rudimentary dimensional data marts for retail sales analysis, while Bill Inmon, widely regarded as the “father of data warehousing,” began articulating the principles of integrated, subject-oriented repositories. IBM’s Information Management System (IMS), introduced in 1968, provided hierarchical database capabilities that supported early decision-support queries, even if they were far from the normalised, time-variant ideals of later architectures.
The real crystallisation came in 1988, when Devlin and Murphy’s framework described a structured flow of data from operational systems to decision-support environments, addressing the redundancy, cost, and silos plaguing organisations. Inmon’s seminal 1992 book, Building the Data Warehouse, formalised the top-down approach, centralised, normalised (third normal form), enterprise-wide, while Ralph Kimball’s 1996 The Data Warehouse Toolkit popularised the bottom-up alternative: dimensional star schemas optimised for query performance in departmental marts.
Wikipedia’s chronological timeline captures this layered evolution with precision: from the 1960s conceptual groundwork and 1970s data marts, through the 1980s architectural blueprints and specialised hardware (Teradata’s DBC/1012 in 1983), to the 1990s methodological split between Inmon’s enterprise model and Kimball’s agile, business-facing designs. Later innovations, data vault modelling (Dan Linstedt, 2000), DW 2.0 (Inmon et al., 2008), and textual disambiguation, reflect ongoing adaptation to new realities: unstructured data, agility, and cloud scale.
What ties these threads together is a recurring insight: data warehousing has never been a sudden invention but an iterative response to the perennial challenge of turning fragmented operational data into coherent, historical, decision-ready insight. The 1980s label may mark the moment the concept acquired a name, but its intellectual DNA stretches back decades, shaped by statisticians, database pioneers, and visionaries who understood that properly structured information becomes a strategic asset. In an age of lakehouses and real-time analytics, that foundational truth endures.

I have added the ‘popular history’ timeline to this blog.  In my opinion, Bill Inmon is the undisputed grandfather of Data Warehousing, and all the rest, even my own contribution in 1983, is relatively lightweight stuff and frugal fare. Go here for the complete Wikipedia article (It’s not great and can be improved): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_warehouse

  • 1960s — General Mills and Dartmouth College, in a joint research project, developed the terms dimensions and facts.[2]
  • 1970s — ACNielsen and IRI provide dimensional data marts for retail sales.[2]
  • 1970s — Bill Inmon begins to define and discuss the term: Data Warehouse
  • 1975 — Sperry Univac introduced MAPPER (Maintain, Prepare, and Produce Executive Reports), a database management and reporting system that includes the world’s first 4GL. It was the first platform specifically designed for building Information Centres (a forerunner of contemporary Enterprise Data Warehousing platforms)
  • 1983 — Teradata introduces a database management system specifically designed for decision support.
  • 1983 — Sperry Corporation Martyn Rhisiart Jones defines the Sperry Information Centre approach, which, whilst not being a true DW in the Inmon sense, did contain many of the characteristics of DW structures and processes as defined previously by Inmon, and later by Devlin. First used at the TSB England & Wales
  • 1984 — Metaphor Computer Systems, founded by David Liddle and Don Massaro, releases the Data Interpretation System (DIS). DIS was a hardware/software package and a GUI for business users to create a database management and analytics system.
  • 1988 — Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy publish the article An architecture for a business and information system in IBM Systems Journal, where they introduce the term “business Data Warehouse”.
  • 1990 — Red Brick Systems, founded by Ralph Kimball, introduces Red Brick Warehouse, a database management system specifically for data warehousing.
  • 1991 — Prism Solutions, founded by Bill Inmon, introduces Prism Warehouse Manager, software for developing a Data Warehouse.
  • 1992 — Bill Inmon publishes the book Building the Data Warehouse.[3]
  • 1995 — The Data Warehousing Institute, a for-profit organisation that promotes data warehousing, is founded.
  • 1996 — Ralph Kimball publishes the book The Data Warehouse Toolkit.[4]
  • 2000 — Daniel Linstedt releases the Data Vault, enabling real-time, auditable Data Warehouses.
  • 2015 — Martyn Rhisiart Jones, after years of R&D, introduces analytical time travel to the European Big Data conference in Madrid.

Many thanks for reading.

File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Martyn Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro

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