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Data Vault Multiverse Metadata

10 min readAug 17, 2026

What every data vault universe contains.. and what it enables

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The pragmatic data vault is a fully auditable data architecture supported by a flexible data model non-destructive to change. In every single record we will find the same set of data vault metadata to support its auditability. As we have defined the basic building blocks of a data vault model, we will define what is different about the same data vault metadata as it is applied to these building blocks.

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  • The hub table will record the first time the business key was recorded, and optionally the last time (update required) too.
  • The link table will record the first time the relationship was recorded, and optionally the last time (update required) too.
  • The satellite table will record every time there is a true change to the previous state of a business key or relationship’s modelled attributes

Since we capture this data in a way to store it dimensionally (tracking changes only), do we then lose the metadata from the processes that brought this data into data vault when there was no change? No, we do record tracking that is best expressed as a shared satellite table…

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Patrick Cuba
Patrick Cuba

Written by Patrick Cuba⁠

A Data Vault 2.0 Expert, Snowflake Solution Architect