Summary

Due to the constantly changing nature of master data in the source system, the data warehouse must serve two critical functions to allow business users to pivot between current and historical attribute values in their reporting. These functions consist of capturing source system changes in a landing area and creating SCDs that meet the organization’s reporting needs. Because master data plays such a key part in organizational analytics—often being tracked and scrutinized independently of fact records—learning to construct the required SCD structures and load them efficiently is a fundamental task for any data warehouse team.

In this chapter, we reviewed eight different SCD structures for meeting various analytical needs: from durable Type 0 attributes that never change to dynamic Type 7 configurations that can handle any requirement. Although many variations exist—even within SCD types—Types 1-3 are the most often used as they strike an...