Basic Notions
Data Vault attempts to solve the problem of dealing with change in the environment by separating the business keys (that do not mutate as often, because they uniquely identify a business entity) and the associations between those business keys, from the descriptive attributes of those keys.
The business keys and their associations are structural attributes, forming the skeleton of the data model. The Data Vault method has as one of its main axioms that real business keys only change when the business changes and are therefore the most stable elements from which to derive the structure of a historical database. If you use these keys as the backbone of a Data Warehouse, you can organize the rest of the data around them. This means that choosing the correct keys for the Hubs is of prime importance for the stability of your model. The keys are stored in tables with a few constraints on the structure. These key-tables are called Hubs.
Read more about this topic: Data Vault Modeling
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