5 Business reasons for using Data Vault

Data Vault 2.0 is a concept for designing Data Warehouses. Invented by data warehouse guru Dan Linstedt it has many technical advantages, but it also has significant business benefits:

1. Change is constant in today’s business world: Change is a reality and your data warehouse needs to adapt to a changing environment. Data Vault abstracts your business rules from the datasets beneath it. When the business changes, you can easily modify the rules and quickly generate the results you need. This allows you to be agile, dynamic, and flexible in the face of change.

2. Big Data is everywhere and getting bigger: Every organisation is facing a dramatic increase in the data being generated and the number of sources of data are growing equally quickly. Data Vault is designed to efficiently scale and add new data sources without impacting the existing design.

3. Nothing is ever perfect: Your data is never perfect and however good you think it is the longer you look at it the more data quality issues you will find. Many traditional approaches start with a large data cleansing exercise which soaks up considerable time and resource. This process can be error prone and bring up potential issues The Data Vault approach simplifies the data ingestion process and removes the need for an upfront data cleanse.

4. Auditability is a necessary evil: The requirements of audit and compliance are constantly increasing. A Data Vault designed Data Warehouse allows records to be reconciled directly right back to their source. Thus, providing end to end traceability. The benefit is that data quality issues are easily tracked down and furthermore it gives an audit trail for compliance purposes.

5. Projects need to deliver results quicker: Once the decision is taken to invest in a Data Warehouse, business users expect results in weeks or months not years. Delivering early results means that issues will be identified early, reducing the risks associated with poorly defined requirements. The Data Vault method lends itself to an agile project implementation. New data sources can be added over time, change is easy and encouraged.

Dan Linstedt ideas for designing data warehouses are outlined in his book “Building a Scalable Data Warehouse with Data Vault 2.0”. His tried and tested techniques underpin our methods.

In conclusion, the Data Vault method gives organisations an enterprise level scalability, agility, and traceability. The ability to build efficient data pipelines to support data science, self-service analytics and reporting is extremely important in today’s data driven world with data volumes and the numbers of data sources rapidly increasing. Visit our website to find out more about the Data Vault method:

There is a fantastic Data Vault Q&A forum created by “Data Vault User Group” which is free to sign up and use. It’s a great place for beginners and experts to share their knowledge and experiences: https://forum.ukdatavaultusergroup.co.uk/