The surrogate key strikes back
If you ever participated in building a data warehouse or worked around data warehouses, you've probably came across the surrogate key (SK) notion. If you’re not familiar, then take a look at this article on the Kimball's group website. Surrogate keys are very common in data warehouses and they bring a lot of functionality, from design to performance enhancements. Now, one of the surrogate key's drawbacks is the difficulty to keep it in synch between all environments. As each environment can be linked to a different version of the source (e.g. UAT, live environments etc.), surrogate keys can get off for the same natural key and this can also have an effect in MicroStrategy. When building attributes you have to define its forms. The ID form should contain a unique key describing the attribute in order to provide correct joining, aggregation and attribute member list when applying filters. Indeed the surrogate key doesn’t have any business meaning, so this form w...