VaultSpeed Template Studio (Release 4.1.16)

Purpose

The introduction of VaultSpeed Studio is an important milestone for VaultSpeed and our Customers. It opens up the powerful VaultSpeed template language and allows you to build, test and put to work your own custom templates to generate any logic required.

VaultSpeed Studio offers a solution for those clients looking to put automation to work in other parts of their data warehouse. The raw Data vault consists of highly repeatable patterns. On the contrary, pre-staging area’s or presentation area’s require more specific logic. Studio enables customers to automate these patterns as well.

This first version is released in closed alpha (i.e. only accessible on request). It allows Customers and Partners to build templates for the creation and loading of objects in the Business Vault Area. The following types of objects can, for example, be created: calculated satellites, effectivity satellites, end date satellites (for insert only), custom PITs, custom Bridges and much more.

Repeatability versus customization

VaultSpeed covers almost any object in the Raw Data Vault. We also cover standard PITs and Bridges tables in the Business Vault area. These objects are highly repeatable as they look the same in every organisation.

Pre-staging area’s, presentation area’s and access layers and certain business vault objects require a different approach. While still being a good target for automation, they require more customization and creativity. They do not necessarily look the same across organisations.

We situate VaultSpeed Studio in the area where objects become a less repeatable and require more customization.

The Interface

VaultSpeed Studio comes as a separate module. In this release we added the studio module for the Business Vault. Once you select a Business Vault release it will appear in the top menu.

After opening Template Studio, a main window will appear where you can see a list of saved templates. When starting a new template or when changing an existing one, you can use populair code editors like Visual Studio Code (for which we deliver a code plugin) or you can view, edit and test the code in the editor screen.

Template Language

Our template language was built to distinguish logic from implementation details. By result the language is quite easy to learn.

Signature attributes

When building templates based on metadata it is necessary to make a categorization in fields. In VaultSpeed, we do this by defining signature attributes. A signature attribute from a source model can be a Business Key, Relation Key, or other. Next to the standard signature objects you can now define new signature attrubutes on which generic logic can be applied (repeatable pattern).

The more generic a signature attribute, the more repeatable the patterns that you can create with them. VaultSpeed’s standard templates use these highly generic signature attribute for the generation of Raw Data Vault objects and Business Vault objects like PITs and Bridges.

However, when you are building custom templates, you must be able to create custom signature attribute. So when you would need to perform a certain operation on a set of custom fields, you will be able to define your own signature attributes in VaultSpeed Studio.

Template language

The VSS template language has a hierarchical structure. Each level in the hierarchy starts with a certain keyword and continues until the next one or the end of the file. Each of these levels can be conditioned based on certain parameters and variables, this allows you to combine the logic for different types of objects into 1 template.

Pricing

VS Studio will be released in open alpha in one of the following releases. By then it will include a limited 30 day trial period of VSS for everyone, full usage of VSS will require an additional subscription.

Foreign keys to REF tables

We added the ability to define foreign keys to reference tables. You can create relations between an object and a reference table and this will result in an additional ref_fk attribute in the satellite, these foreign key attributes will be coalesced with null values. This, combined with the addition of ghost records to the REF objects allows for inner joins between Satellites and Reference tables.

Multi Active Satellites

You can now create multi active satellites with a sub-sequence attribute in the source. An attribute can be set to be the sub-sequence attribute in the source graphical editor, this attribute in combination with the business key should be unique.

Other features

We added a status indication for new and deleted objects in the grouping and DV overview screens. This change also introduces some performance improvements for these screens.

Selecting a reset option (i.e. not “keep everything”) when creating a new source release will reset the release to the latest one linked to a DV production release. If no production date is set yet, then it will reset fully like before.

There is an additional attribute type available in the source graphical editor: modification date. When the cdc type is modification date then setting a column to this type will indicate that it is the cdc-timestamp metadata attribute for a certain object.

It is now possible to delete entire projects: this can be useful for deleting a sandbox project that had been created for testing purposes. In this way you can keep your account nice and clean from clutter.

We added the ability to define unique keys in the source graphical editor, they can be defined by selecting attributes while holding ctrl/command and then right clicking and selecting unique key (and optionally a name for the ey). You can also set an attribute to UK from the attribute sidebar.

Conclusion

VaultSpeed invests heavily in making the complex process of enterprise wide data integration as easy as possible. With this in mind, we will keep improving towards intuitive graphical interfaces that should assist the user in the decision-making process by implementing smart suggestions and eliminating as much of the manual work as possible.

Not all layers of a data warehouse can match the repeatability of the raw data vault layer. Pre-staging layers, Business data vault objects or data marts demand a higher level of customization. Vaultspeed will extend its capabilities to add custom logic so that our customers can work towards tailor-made solutions for their data integration challenges.

So stay tuned… more features are coming soon!