The Data Vault Handbook - Concepts and Applications

2.2. ENTERPRISE DATA WARE- HOUSE

The second layer of the Data Vault archi- tecture is the Enterprise Data Warehouse, where source data is integrated to create a single point of the facts—providing all the data, all the time—using Data Vault mod-

eling standards. The Enterprise Data Warehouse is divided into two com- ponents: the Raw Data Vault and the Business Vault, each of which will be explained in detail in the following sections. 2.2.1. RAW DATA VAULT The Raw Data Vault is the foundational component of the Enterprise Data Warehouse, designed to store and manage all the raw unmodified data coming from the Staging Area. Here only hard rules can be applied (Section 1.3.1). This layer is where the data from various source systems is integrated and modeled using Data Vault techniques, ensuring that the data’s original granularity is preserved while establishing a single version of the facts. In the Raw Data Vault, data is organized into Hubs, Links, and Satellites, which are the core entities of the Data Vault model (Section 3.1), and oth- er derived entities (Section 3.2). Hubs, Links, and Satellites represent core business objects, their relationships, and their descriptive attributes, respec- tively. One of the key advantages of the Raw Data Vault is its ability to retain the full historical context of the data. Unlike traditional data warehouses, where data might be aggregated or summarized on the way to the warehouse, the