Data Vault Modeling
Developed by Dan Linstedt, data vault modeling aims to be the most flexible modeling technique, adapting to changes and new datasets easily while storing all historical data by default. There are 3 core types of tables in data vault: hubs, links, and satellites.
- Hubs: tables that contain a list of unique business keys (natural keys), surrogate keys, and metadata describing the data source for each hub item.
- Links: tables that associate hubs and satellites via the business key.
- Satellites: tables that hold the descriptive data about the entities being modeled as well as start and end date columns to track historical changes.
- Tracks historical changes by default (good for auditing/tracing)
- Extremely resilient to changing data
- Enables parallel loading
- Considered an advanced technique that requires more experience to implement
- Querying data vault is more complex compared to other techniques