Your organization is designing a star schema for its e-commerce data warehouse. The model includes a very large Sales fact table that must join to a Product dimension table containing thousands of descriptive attributes (brand, category, size, color, etc.). To follow dimensional-modeling best practices and minimize storage and join costs in the fact table, which primary-key strategy is most appropriate for the Product dimension table?
A globally unique identifier (GUID) assigned by the e-commerce application
A concatenated natural key made of SupplierID and ManufacturerPartNumber
A composite key of ProductSKU combined with EffectiveStartDate and EffectiveEndDate
An auto-incrementing integer surrogate key generated within the data warehouse
Dimensional modeling guidelines recommend assigning each dimension row a meaningless, sequential surrogate key-typically a 4-byte integer-rather than relying on natural business keys or wide composite keys. A compact surrogate key keeps the fact table's foreign-key columns small (saving space and index overhead), speeds join performance, shields the warehouse from changes to source-system codes, and is mandatory when tracking slowly changing dimension history. Natural keys, GUIDs and composite keys all consume more space, may change unexpectedly, and complicate surrogate-key lookups for historical versioning, so they are not preferred choices for a dimension table in a star schema.
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CompTIA Data+ DA0-002 (V2)
Data Concepts and Environments
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