Book Image

Data Modeling for Azure Data Services

By : Peter ter Braake
Book Image

Data Modeling for Azure Data Services

By: Peter ter Braake

Overview of this book

Data is at the heart of all applications and forms the foundation of modern data-driven businesses. With the multitude of data-related use cases and the availability of different data services, choosing the right service and implementing the right design becomes paramount to successful implementation. Data Modeling for Azure Data Services starts with an introduction to databases, entity analysis, and normalizing data. The book then shows you how to design a NoSQL database for optimal performance and scalability and covers how to provision and implement Azure SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Synapse SQL Pool. As you progress through the chapters, you'll learn about data analytics, Azure Data Lake, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse and explore dimensional modeling, data vault modeling, along with designing and implementing a Data Lake using Azure Storage. You'll also learn how to implement ETL with Azure Data Factory. By the end of this book, you'll have a solid understanding of which Azure data services are the best fit for your model and how to implement the best design for your solution.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Operational/OLTP Databases
8
Section 2 – Analytics with a Data Lake and Data Warehouse
13
Section 3 – ETL with Azure Data Factory

Designing Hub tables

As already mentioned, Data Vault distinguishes between three different types of tables: Hub tables, Link tables, and Satellite tables. The first step in the modeling process is to find the Hub tables, or just Hubs. Hubs have a direct relationship to what we called entities in Chapter 2, Entity Analysis. Data Vault calls these business keys. Each entity has a characteristic that makes it unique. That characteristic was called a logical key in Chapter 1, Introduction to Databases. In Data Vault, it is called the business key. Each business key (that is, each entity) will be implemented as a Hub table. A sales process will have a Hub for products and a Hub for customers. Product and Customer are the entities involved in a sales transaction.

A Hub table has only four columns. You can see a Hub table example in Figure 9.4:

Figure 9.4 – Hub table

All the columns in the Hub table are mandatory and you should always create them in order...