This year’s World Wide Data Vault Consortium was not halted by COVID! The leading Data Warehouse forum for those interested in Enterprise Data Warehousing was able to happen – all be it 100% virtual. 

For those in Australia and New Zealand that were hardy or foolish enough (opinions vary) to attend the live sessions held at East Coast United States time, it was a great opportunity to catch-up with friends old and new. All the sessions this year were recorded and made available for those that decided to stick to more conventional sleep patterns. And it’s not too late to sign up to get access. 

The WWDVC once again did not disappoint, offering great value to its attendees.  All the leading automation vendors were in attendance, strutting their wares, roadmaps and new functionality.  The theme and emphasis this year clearly showed the shift in the marketplace in supporting machine learning and analytics. Great topics and speakers presented on these topics and others around the importance of organised and integrated data as the fundamental backbone of the success of all these efforts. 

Although the theme of machine learning and analytics flowed strongly throughout the week, it was well balanced with hands-on sessions with various tools and vendors, had good representation on best practices as presented by Scott Ambler and the IIBA community, governance requirements, a bit of philosophy (the Laws of Nature for Information), DevOps as well as great presentations on personal experiences from various implementations. 

NEW: A Vendor Certification Program

One of the major announcements at the WWDVC was the Vendor Certification Program.  The purpose of this program is to vet and certify that the vendor does indeed deliver on the Data Vault 2.0 standards and supports the methodology and architectures necessary for successful Data Vault implementations. This will be an ongoing program with participants benefitting from getting an independent expert assessment of their platform that they can go to market with. This also provides validated assurance to the customers in the marketplace that they are getting the expected value for money from the various vendors. Each vendor will have to renew their certification every two years or with major releases, ensuring ongoing compliance to the DV 2.0 standards.

NEW: A unified Star Schema approach

The other technical presentation that stood out, was the introduction of a unified Star Schema approach for reporting that deals elegantly with reporting data at different grain without needing massive pre-processing and or allocation processes – called a “Puppini Bridge”.  Really handy design from a consumption and reporting perspective.    

Overall, not only was “how to get data into Data Vault” well covered, but also “how to consume from Data Vault” – all together well rounded. 

It was not all work and no play either.  One of the great traditions at the WWDVC conferences are the DV Games.  This year’s was a virtual scavenger hunt across 10 categories. Let's just say it was side splitting fun – despite it being virtual! 

So, as you can see there was something for everyone at this year’s WWDVC conference!

Watch the recordings online

If you did not get the chance to attend, fear not!  The whole conference is available to view at your leisure via the Data Vault Alliance platform for a fee!