Sobes.tech
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.