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Data Vault Limitations

While Stream2Vault (S2V) aims to provide comprehensive support for Data Vault 2.0 principles, there are certain limitations regarding the types of Data Vault objects and specific modeling patterns it currently supports.

Unsupported Advanced Data Vault Objects​

Stream2Vault focuses on the core, standard Data Vault entities. Some more advanced or specialized Data Vault object types are not natively supported by S2V at this time.

  • Multi-Active Satellites: S2V does not have built-in support for generating Multi-Active Satellites when the source_load_type is an incremental source. These satellites are used to store multiple active descriptive records for the same business key from the same source, often differentiated by a "multi-active key" attribute having multiple records per entity key at the same load date. Due to the nature of incremental sources, only records change for a subset of the multi-active key columns making it difficult to fetch old and unchanged versions making it a "regular" satellite. Therefore we propose to use alternate (common data vault) strategies to deal with multi-activtiy if required like creating an additional Hub with a Link. However, the parameter is still required for satellites and link satellites but do not change the code generation (only in full_history sources) - it shall act for Data Modellers to understand downstream dependencies and make sure, that data is required to be filtered properly.

Modeling Pattern Limitations​

These are not strict prohibitions but rather current constraints in how S2V interprets or generates certain patterns:

  • Single Use of a Source in a Link: A specific source table (defined by its database, schema, and table name) can be referenced only once within the entity_sources section of a single Link definition. If you need to derive different parts of the same Link from the same physical source table based on different criteria, you might need to model add a new relation.

It's important to be aware of these limitations when designing your Data Vault model with Stream2Vault. Check the FAQ section for suggested design strategies to address these limitations.