Data solution design patterns, implementation, and automation
Over the weekend I have written up a brief overview and ‘thought piece’ of what I mean when I talk about a Virtual Data Warehouse and Data Warehouse Virtualisation. Please have a look at the article here: The Virtual Data Warehouse. A special thanks to Bret Victor for sharing a fascinating presentation on ‘inventing in principle’. This is a concept, or I should rather say a principle, I have been working on for some time now....
I encountered a very annoying issue the other day, and on the off-chance that anyone else may run into it as well I thought I’d post the fix for it. When showing some SSIS generation code using Biml Express (which is still awesome) to a colleague recently I couldn’t get the Biml files to properly open in Visual Studio using the Biml Express plug-in. The original files were still OK (not corrupted or anything), and...
Hi everyone. This is just a quick note that I moved all samples from QuickDBD to SQL DBM. QuickDBD has changed its pricing model in a way that prevented me from sharing the samples in an easy way. I updated the various links on this site to reflect the new location of the data models. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. The new models look pretty good I think, have a look at...
If you are interested in understanding and discussing the intricacies of developing a Data Vault based data platform / Data Warehouse, then please consider the upcoming Data Vault implementation training course. It is a practical training focused on understanding the impacts of various design decisions on the (Data Vault) patterns and overall solution architecture. Regardless whether you develop your solution using custom scripting or by using an ‘off-the-shelf’ vendor application, you need detailed understand how...
How can you be sure you load 100% of the data 100% of the time? This is an article that expands on a topic that often comes up in the Data Vault implementation training: applying Referential Integrity and consistency checks in Data Vault. It sounds straightforward, but in reality these are interesting topics for any Data Warehouse (DWH) and Data Vault practitioner. I started to write a blog post about it, but before I knew...
Right or wrong? When it comes to data management there are almost always various alternatives for implementation and none of them are necessarily right or wrong. They represent the various options and consequences to consider, and the right solution usually is the one which is made with full understanding of these consequences, with ‘eyes wide open’. Supporting multi-active, sometimes referred to as ‘multi-variant’ or ‘multi-valued’, behaviour of Satellites is one of these areas where opinions...
Development update This is a status update for the small community of open source developers and collaborators that use, or contribute to, the growing ecosystem of metadata management and Data Vault generation tooling. I’ve worked hard on creating a more stable set of tooling around ETL generation and as a result the TEAM and VEDW applications (as well as some others) have now been completely separated with a view to increase greater interoperability with other...
Hi everyone, sorry it has been a while! I’m done travelling for a while (both for work as well as leisure) and have been a bit quiet working on new training materials and code updates for the various collaboration areas. As a result, and in the short term, I will resume posting plenty of articles on the weblog to capture various lessons learned and ideas as well as open-source code releases – so watch this...
Making hash keys smaller A few months ago I posted an article explaining the merits of the ‘natural business key‘, which can make sense in certain situations. And, from a more generic perspective, why this is something the Data Warehouse management system (‘the engine‘) would be able to figure out automatically and change on the fly when required. This article used the common approach of storing the hash values in character fields (i.e. CHAR(32) for...
After having used Git(Hub) to work and collaborate on code for a long time, I have recently spent some time to merge and move various documentation artefacts to GitHub as well. This covers the Data Integration framework and Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) architecture documentation, most importantly the various Design Patterns and Solution Patterns. These patterns form the central body of content that actually try to explain how things work in practice. I think it makes a...
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Data Vault Meetup - Germany (June 10, 2024)
