Implementing a Question Story in Data Vault 2: White Paper

This white paper describes the experiences of an agile data warehousing team. They are building the first release of Converge, a continuous data pipeline based on Data Vault 2 (DV2). Converge will support better decision-making by management and the training and operation of enterprise-class artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The team is holding a demo and design review to show what new value they’ve produced and how they did so.  The team describes their implementation of a question story, a specialized form of user story that applies to data analytics/business intelligence (BI) scenarios.

It is the first question story that they have built within their DV2 environment, so they are starting fresh. Starting with the question story, the team reviews the pertinent acceptance criteria, how they needed data from multiple legacy sources, how that data was initially stored in the persistent staging area (PSA) to ensure it isn’t dropped, into the raw vault, then only the required data appears in the sparse business vault, and finally denormalized into a dimensional model in the information mart.

Download: Implementing a Question Story in Data Vault 2 (PDF, 3 MB)

Table of Contents

• What has come before (a summary of earlier chapters)
• Taking the opportunity to learn together
• The Demo
• The Design Review
  • The Persistent Staging Area (PSA)
  • The Raw Vault
  • Implementing Change Data Capture (CDC)
  • The Sparse Business Vault
  • Supporting Better Decision Making

Source

The material for this white paper is excerpted from the forthcoming book, Building a Continuous Data Pipeline: One Team’s Experience Enabling Corporate AI and Data-Driven Decision Making by Scott W. Ambler, Spring 2026.