Senior
Tell about approaches to building DWH: Data Vault 2.0 vs snowflake/star — main entities, advantages, and disadvantages.
sobes.tech AI
Answer from AI
Data Vault 2.0 is a methodology for building data warehouses focused on flexibility, scalability, and historization. Main entities:
- Hubs — key business objects with unique business keys.
- Links — relationships between hubs, reflecting associations.
- Satellites — attributes and historical data related to hubs or links.
Advantages of Data Vault 2.0:
- High adaptability to business changes.
- Good support for historization and auditing.
- Separation of structure into keys, links, and attributes simplifies data loading and integration.
Disadvantages:
- More complex architecture and greater data redundancy.
- Requires more complex ETL logic.
Snowflake and Star are classic data modeling schemas for DWH.
- Star: a central fact table is directly connected to dimension tables.
- Snowflake: dimensions are normalized, split into several related tables.
Advantages:
- Simplicity of understanding and query building (especially star).
- Good performance for analytical queries.
- Less data redundancy (especially snowflake).
Disadvantages:
- Less flexibility with changes in business logic.
- Difficulties with historization and auditing without additional mechanisms.
Summary: Data Vault 2.0 is suitable for complex, rapidly changing systems requiring auditing and historization, while snowflake/star are suited for traditional analytical DWH with a fixed model and simple queries.