Patrick Cuba has worked as a consultant specialising in data modelling on SAS platforms for more than two decades. Having worked in South Africa, Australia and the UK, he first worked on a Data Vault project less than five years ago.

Australia is renowned as a surfer’s paradise, and Patrick Cuba’s recently published book ‘The Data Vault Guru: A Pragmatic Guide on Building a Data Vault,’ is certainly attracting a wave of interest.

A question that is often asked by those approaching Data Vault for the first time is, “what are the major benefits of incorporating Data Vault 2.0 into my new data platform design and delivery?

Data analytics consultants, Eckerson Group, predicted a year ago that 2020 would be ‘The year of Data Vault‘. According to our CEO Neil Strange that has certainly proved to be so. Businesses are gathering pace with their plans for 2021 and beyond, with digital transformation increasingly important in many walks of life.

Apart from making New Year resolutions, January normally starts with the problem of what to do about unwanted Christmas presents. Socks have been the staple gift for generations – well for men – for family members stuck with what to buy someone for Christmas, and are unlikely to go away.

Snowflake’s emergence has seen its customers manage some 250PB of data on its cloud platform – processing some 515 million workloads that run every day.

A summer work placement for physics student Chris Fisher has developed into an exciting career working as a Data Engineer.

A business case for a new Data Platform is notoriously difficult to produce as hard evidence of benefits can be elusive. Perhaps, because modern Data Platforms are embedded in operational business processes and have decision-making or revenue generating responsibilities, this difficulty will disappear.

Take a chain. Hold it up and stretch it, placing it under stress. You will see the links tightening, distributing the stress equally along the length of the chain. Now gradually increase the stress until the chain fails. Where did the chain fail? If the stress is passed equally along the length, then it must have failed at the weakest link.

Most senior executives today recognise the need to drive more value out of their data. The question for systems architects and data engineers is how to deliver what the business requires. The traditional stereotyped view of a Data Warehouse as a repository tacked onto the side of the IT architecture to allow business reporting and analytics is way out of date.

Legislators and governments globally are starting to wake up to the implications of the digital revolution on individuals’ rights. This is exacerbated by the fact that choice is limited, as a small group of companies dominate the consumer space.

You may feel trapped by your legacy Data Warehouse solution. You have proprietary software, on premise servers and inflexible data pipelines. Costs may be high and delivered capability low.