
Short summary of Multi-Active Satellites
Multi-active satellites allow you to implement multi-active records per business key in Data Vault 2.0. To illustrate the need for the solution, let’s look at the common occurrence of a source system that doesn’t provide the needed metadata such as when working with XML-files.
One solution to the above is to create a multi-active satellite by adding a subsequence number per business key. This accounts for any instance in which there is no multi-active attribute delivered by the source itself. Regarding phone numbers, this information could be a tag for a business, home or mobile phone number. Another possibility is to create an extra hub for the multi-active attribute. Though, since it doesn’t present a real business object, the first solution can be more effective.
Delta Check OFF
There are two ways to insert new records into a multi-active satellite – having delta checks active or inactive. With delta checks turned off, all records of a business key are inserted into the satellite from your source delivery.
The advantage to that is that loads are faster and have a consistent load date timestamp to the parent hash key, independent of the multi-active attribute.
Later on, it simplifies the query based on the multi-active data (see figure 1). As a critical drawback, the ingested amount of data can increase strongly if full date loads are received.
In this case, you should partition your data by the load date timestamp.