Data Vault Mysteries… Business Vault

In today’s episode of Data Vault Mysteries, we open the book on Business Vault.

What is it?

To understand Business Vault we need to understand Raw Vault first. A data vault model is made up of hubs, links and satellites as it is well documented. Each of these artefacts has a special purpose that is defined as the following:

• A hub table is the unique list of business keys, and a raw vault model can have many; each representing a domain, subject area, capability or part of a business process of the organization. For a unique list of account numbers, you will typically find in a table called hub_account, customer ids would have been loaded to hub_customer and so on.
• A link table not only contains the relationships between business keys but also represents the unit of work. Where does this unit of work come from? Well, they come from the automated data output of business processes.
• A satellite table is used to track the change record for either a hub table (business key) or a link table (the unit of work).

Why then are these defined as RAW vault artefacts? Because the data is produced by source applications that ultimately are automation engines for business processes. And they continue to produce data, collected and modelled into a raw vault.