William H. Inmon is an American computer scientist, recognized by many as the father of the data warehouse. Inmon wrote the first book, held the first conference (with Arnie Barnett), wrote the first column in a magazine and was the first to offer classes in data warehousing. Inmon created the accepted definition of what a data warehouse is - a subject-oriented, non-volatile, integrated, time-variant collection of data in support of management's decisions. Compared with the approach of the other pioneering architect of data warehousing, Ralph Kimball, Inmon's approach is often characterized as a top-down approach.
For those thinking about Big Data - 80% of the 7 exabytes of data stored last year was unstructured meaning that using traditional analytics tools will even with the cloud's elasticity can handle - does a nice job of out lining in very plain english some best practices, a little out of data, recommend some memcache articles