What is a surrogate key?

< 1 min read

A surrogate key is an artificial, system-generated unique identifier for a table.
It has no business meaning and is usually an auto-increment number.
Surrogate keys are commonly used in dimension tables.
In one project, we used surrogate keys for the customer dimension.
This helped handle duplicate or changing business keys like customer IDs.
It also improved join performance between fact and dimension tables.
Surrogate keys support slowly changing dimensions effectively.
They make the data model more stable and easier to maintain.

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