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Methodologies provide a best practice framework for delivering successful business intelligence and data warehouse projects.
Depending on your requirements, we will draw on one or more of the following established methodologies.
The way we manage data must be flexible and able to adapt to today’s fast-changing and dynamic businesses and agile working practices. But traditional data modelling methodologies (such as Kimball) aren’t designed to respond to fast changes. Implementing Data Vault modelling can help address this challenge.
The Data Vault methodology approach
Data Vault architecture is a hybrid approach that combines the best of 3rd Normal Form (3NF) and dimension modeling. This data modeling technique enables historical storage of data, integration of data from different operational systems as well as traceability and auditability of the data being loaded into the database.
The Data Vault approach is based on the concept of Hubs, Links and Satellites:
Data Vault architecture: benefits and advantages
Data Vault architecture is designed to be flexible and adaptable to meet the changing needs of an enterprise. With traditional data models, it could take BI teams months to add new relationships into the data warehouse, because those relationships are built into the schema of the warehouse. So any change requires extensive governance and testing. The Data Vault approach makes enterprise data warehouses more agile, because the relationships are not part of the schema – they are just data rows in the Links and Satellite tables. This enables rapid implementation of evolving data relationships.
The advantages Data Vault brings are:
Data Vault also lends itself to pattern-based, metadata-driven development. In many cases this can lead to reduced time spent developing and maintaining the data warehouse and associated extract, transform and load processes.
Our Data Vault experience
At Theta we have a team of Data Vault certified experts located in our Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch offices. Our consultants have experience in all aspects of Data Vault architecture:
Data Vault courses and training
We partner with Hans Hultgren (Genesee Academy), one of the leading proponents of Data Vault worldwide. Hans provides training and best practice advice on Data Vault techniques.
If you are interested in Data Vault courses or training please get in touch.
The Kimball Data Warehouse Methodology was developed by Ralph Kimball, who is widely regarded as the father of the data warehouse. Guidelines that every Kimball data warehouse should follow include:
Theta’s Data Framework methodology draws on our experience implementing many data warehouse solutions using both cloud and on-premises technologies. The Data Framework is a set of processes, procedures and code that can be reused across organisations.
This infrastructure provides:
The advantages of implementing the Theta Data Framework methodology include;
Theta uses an iterative approach to deploy data warehouse and BI solutions, where we prioritise components or features of the solution for deployment based on a combination of:
The objective is to get as much value (usually in the form of information assets) into the hands of users, where it can provide the most value as quickly as possible.
This goes hand in hand with our iterative approach to BI development. Key elements include:
The advantages of deploying solutions in a pragmatic, agile and iterative way include: