Bridge tables

Not part of the free edition, and not switched on for every paying organization either. The Data Vault and Data Mart accelerators are enrolled surfaces. If the menu items described below are missing, that is the reason, and it is not a fault. See Pricing for what each edition includes.

A bridge table pre-joins a hub to the hubs around it through the links between them, giving query tools a single wide table of hash keys to join marts against instead of walking the raw vault link by link. It is a query-performance helper: the join chain is derived from your model at render time, not stored as SQL, so renaming an object can never leave it stale.

Create a bridge

A bridge starts from an anchor hub and walks outward along links.

1. Right-click a hub node and choose Create Bridge.
2. Only links driven by this hub is on by default. It restricts the first level to links whose driving key is this hub. Turn it off to see every link attached to the hub.
3. Under Linked hubs, tick the hubs to reach. Each option reads as the far hub followed by the link it travels through (for example “Product via Order Line”).
4. Ticking a first-level hub can reveal a Second level list: links off that hub to further hubs. Tick those to extend the chain by another hop.
5. Accept or edit the Name, then choose Create.

Repeated hubs are aliased automatically, and each option names the link it travels through, so two paths to the same hub stay distinct. The dialog reaches two link hops out from the anchor, which covers the great majority of bridge shapes.

Set your links’ driving keys first if you want the default filter to be useful: it reads the driving keys you assign on each link. See Driving keys on links in the modeling guide.

Edit a bridge

Right-click a bridge node and choose Edit Bridge to reopen the dialog with its current steps pre-checked. Adjust the selections and choose Apply.

Editing preserves steps the dialog cannot redraw. A bridge that was built with more hops than the two-level dialog shows keeps those deeper steps when you edit it: they stay on the bridge rather than being dropped just because the dialog does not display them.

What renders

The generated table joins the anchor hub through each step’s link to that step’s hub by hash key, with alias infixes that keep repeated hubs distinct, coalescing to the zero key at each hop when ghost records are on.