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Question:  Surrogate key

Answer: why we implement sarrogate key in ETL Process?


November 11, 2008 01:23:01 #4
 hiteshkhatri   Member Since: February 2008    Total Comments: 1 

RE: Surrogate key
 

ETL is not a one time process. It is used to make periodical updates to
dimensional as well as fact data.


Usually dimensions contains lookup data and has less tendency to change, but
if it changes and you want to maintain the change history then surrogate key
will help with it. Read about SCD (slowly changing dimension) for more details.


Also, surrogate key helps uniquely identify a row in the table. Many times
ETL Extraction process is designed to pull data from multiple sources and
there's possibility that same rows can get pulled from different sources. If you
use key column same as source, you are likely to get the Primary Key violation
error. Surrogate key will let you pull all the data and you can clean it during
Transformation/Cleansing process.


     

 

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