Jun 12, 2009 Putting together a few steps to generate surrogate key: Most of you might've dealt with it already. But, sending it as it might be a quick reference incase of future use Generating it as such isn’t a big deal, it might get a little tricky when you are trying to insert new values in continuation of already existing surrogate key. The table is obtained after joining a source table and reference table and the column is the primary key column ('accountkey') of resultant table where null values should be replaced with unique sequence keys. The unique keys generated should start with a number assigned to the source and the number should be incremented for each null value.
Recommendations and examples for using the IDENTITY property to create surrogate keys on tables in Synapse SQL pool.
What is a surrogate key
A surrogate key on a table is a column with a unique identifier for each row. The key is not generated from the table data. Data modelers like to create surrogate keys on their tables when they design data warehouse models. You can use the IDENTITY property to achieve this goal simply and effectively without affecting load performance.
Creating a table with an IDENTITY column
The IDENTITY property is designed to scale out across all the distributions in the Synapse SQL pool without affecting load performance. Therefore, the implementation of IDENTITY is oriented toward achieving these goals.
You can define a table as having the IDENTITY property when you first create the table by using syntax that is similar to the following statement:
You can then use
INSERT.SELECT to populate the table.
This remainder of this section highlights the nuances of the implementation to help you understand them more fully.
Allocation of values
The IDENTITY property doesn't guarantee the order in which the surrogate values are allocated, which reflects the behavior of SQL Server and Azure SQL Database. However, in Synapse SQL pool, the absence of a guarantee is more pronounced.
The following example is an illustration:
In the preceding example, two rows landed in distribution 1. The first row has the surrogate value of 1 in column
C1 , and the second row has the surrogate value of 61. Both of these values were generated by the IDENTITY property. However, the allocation of the values is not contiguous. This behavior is by design.
Skewed data
The range of values for the data type are spread evenly across the distributions. If a distributed table suffers from skewed data, then the range of values available to the datatype can be exhausted prematurely. For example, if all the data ends up in a single distribution, then effectively the table has access to only one-sixtieth of the values of the data type. For this reason, the IDENTITY property is limited to
INT and BIGINT data types only.
SELECT.INTO
When an existing IDENTITY column is selected into a new table, the new column inherits the IDENTITY property, unless one of the following conditions is true:
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If any one of these conditions is true, the column is created NOT NULL instead of inheriting the IDENTITY property. Bulletstorm product key generator free download.
CREATE TABLE AS SELECT
CREATE TABLE AS SELECT (CTAS) follows the same SQL Server behavior that's documented for SELECT.INTO. However, you can't specify an IDENTITY property in the column definition of the
CREATE TABLE part of the statement. You also can't use the IDENTITY function in the SELECT part of the CTAS. To populate a table, you need to use CREATE TABLE to define the table followed by INSERT.SELECT to populate it.
Explicitly inserting values into an IDENTITY column
Synapse SQL pool supports
SET IDENTITY_INSERT <your table> ON|OFF syntax. You can use this syntax to explicitly insert values into the IDENTITY column.
Many data modelers like to use predefined negative values for certain rows in their dimensions. An example is the -1 or 'unknown member' row.
Generate rsa key pair node js pdf. The next script shows how to explicitly add this row by using SET IDENTITY_INSERT:
Loading data
The presence of the IDENTITY property has some implications to yourt be used: Key phrases and terms generator.
The following related functions are not supported in Synapse SQL pool:
Common tasks
This section provides some sample code you can use to perform common tasks when you work with IDENTITY columns.
Column C1 is the IDENTITY in all the following tasks.
Find the highest allocated value for a table
Use the
MAX() function to determine the highest value allocated for a distributed table:
Udf To Generate Surrogate Keys 2017Find the seed and increment for the IDENTITY property
You can use the catalog views to discover the identity increment and seed configuration values for a table by using the following query:
Next stepsGoal
Fill in a data warehouse dimension table with data which comes from different source systems and assign a unique record identifier (surrogate key) to each record.
Scenario overview and details
To illustrate this example, we will use two made up sources of information to provide data about customers dimension. Each extract contains customer records with a business key (natural key) assigned to it.
In order to isolate the data warehouse from source systems, we will introduce a technical surrogate key instead of re-using the source system's natural (business) key. A unique and common surrogate key is a one-field numeric key which is shorter, easier to maintain and understand, and independent from changes in source system than using a business key. Also, if a surrogate key generation process is implemented correctly, adding a new source system to the data warehouse processing will not require major efforts. Surrogate key generation mechanism may vary depending on the requirements, however the inputs and outputs usually fit into the design shown below: Inputs: - an input respresented by an extract from the source system - datawarehouse table reference for identifying the existing records - maximum key lookup Outputs: - output table or file with newly assigned surrogate keys - new maximum key - updated reference table with new records Proposed solution
Assumptions:
- The surrogate key field for our made up example is WH_CUST_NO. - To make the example clearer, we will use SCD 1 to handle changing dimensions. This means that new records overwrite the existing data. The ETL process implementation requires several inputs and outputs. Input data: - customers_extract.csv - first source system extract - customers2.txt - second source system extract - CUST_REF - a lookup table which contains mapping between natural keys and surrogate keys - MAX_KEY - a sequence number which represents last key assignment Output data: - D_CUSTOMER - table with new records and correctly associated surrogate keys - CUST_REF - new mappings added - MAX_KEY sequence increased The design of an ETL process for generating surrogate keys will be as follows:
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