An awesome Data Vault course

We had the privilege of hosting Hans Hultgren in our Wellington offices this week for his 3 day Data Vault Certification course. It was a great three days and confirmed for me that we have found another crucial lego block in our AgileBI stack.

That was a perfect fit for how we deliver

When we started the AgileBI journey a year (or two..) ago, we naively thought that there were probably some people around the world who had done it all before and solved most of the problems we would encounter.  Ideally they would have written books or would run courses that would help us replicate their success.

We were wrong.

But what we did find that there were some very smart people that had spent a lot of time solving parts of the AgileBI problems we would encounter.  Hans was one of these and he has helped solve our Agile Data Modeling problem.

AgileBI Building Blocks

To be a truly Agile team delivering data, analytical models and visualisations every three weeks, you need a lot capabilities in your toolkit to help you deliver. At OptimalBI we talk about the Lego Blocks that are required to make the AgileBI Lego Tower.

We have managed to find or build 4 blocks in our AgileBI tower so far:

When we say we have a block sorted, what we mean is that we have the developed or found the Concepts, Processes and Templates that enable us to deliver this capability consistently.   (And we give ourselves extra points if we have built some automation for it.)

We test we have these blocks sorted by proving we can teach our customers how use deliver this capability like we do.

We were ecstatic that when we found the Data Vault approach as it fitted our needs for Agile Data Modelling perfectly.  And again for extra points it even integrated nicely with our Agile Data requirements gathering approach (based on BEAM).

In fact it is amazing how closely BEAM Data Requirements gathering and Data Vault Data Modeling align.  And that’s an important point I will blog about later, its important that each of the blocks integrate with each other, else we are only building a house of cards, which will easily topple.

Source: Flickr

Impressive but it aint going to last!  A bit like a purely dimensional Enterprise Data Warehouse. And we have even gone for the extra points on the Agile Data Modelling block by starting development on our open source data vault automation engine, ODE.

And of course we have a few more lego blocks to go, which I will blog about later.

Thanks Hans

For now I would just like to say a big ups and thanks to Hans for both his passion, his book and his course as he has given us one of our much required AgileBI Lego Blocks, which means we didn’t need to invent that capability on our own.