The most recent two meetings of the Data Vault North American User Group (DVNAUG) were a two-part webinar focused on end-to-end Data Vaults Done Right, presented by John Giles, an independent consultant and author of “The Nimble Elephant: Agile Delivery of Data Models Using a Pattern-Based Approach” and “The Elephant in the Fridge: Guided Steps to Data Vault Success through Building Business-Centered Models,” with support from Juha Korpela representing Ellie, and Jonas De Keuster, representing VaultSpeed.
First up after messages from DVNAUG sponsors, the group went over core concepts of Data Vault for those new to the methodology as an analytics solution.
Then, John Giles got started with the importance of defining an organization-wide, business-centric view of how the enterprise folk see their data. For the purposes of easy understanding in the webinar, Giles referred to the enterprise ontology as a data “town plan” and how this “town plan” becomes reality iteratively.
He explained how it is possible to use this town plan to shape your Data Vault design and that this iterative approach is built into the Data Vault standards and best practices. The logical hubs, links, and satellites are what the business concepts can be mapped against. Ellie and VaultSpeed representatives assisted in this example to demonstrate how tooling can be used to illustrate the enterprise’s understanding of its operations and to accelerate delivery by taking advantage of Data Vault’s consistent, repeatable pattern-based process and modeling designs.
The webinar included a theatrical performance of an End-to-End Data Vault Done Right via a Business-Centric Top-Down approach, performed by Gayle Bunn and Keith Belanger titled, “It’s no Shakespeare, it’s better, it’s Data Vault.” This performed example acts-out a scenario of business users conducting an interview to understand the business’s ontology, taxonomy, and requirements.
After the main program, DVNAUG meetings leave time for a question-and-answer session. During February’s meeting, inventor of the Data Vault Solution Dan Linstedt joined to field questions. Some questions of note during this webinar were:
- What is the largest Data Vault in the world? Answered by Dan Linstedt.
- Are there internal processes that must be executed in order to populate the same-as links similar to what was shown in the demonstration? Answered by John Giles. (1:54:40)
- Integration between Ellie and VaultSpeed. Answered by Juha, who suggested their article “Integrating Ellie and VaultSpeed for Business-Driven Data Automation” found here: https://bit.ly/3nde51z
If these questions piqued your interest, or if you’d like to catch what you missed, you can watch or listen to the full webinar episode on DVNAUG’s Spotify account here: https://spoti.fi/406qbbc
Note: The audio file is available for anyone to listen to. You must be logged-in to Spotify to watch the video. If you don’t have a Spotify account, it’s free to sign up (Sign up – SpotifySpotifyhttps://www.spotify.com › signup).
The Data Vault North American User Group meets quarterly to discuss the Data Vault solution, implementations, news on the topic, and to network with others interested in DV 2.0. Cynthia Meyersohn serves on the Board of DVNAUG as a Founding Member, Sponsor, and an Authorized Data Vault Certified Instructor.