Can Astera DWBuilder support Late arriving Dimension? I haven’t seen anything as such in Astera DWBuilder so far. I understand it can be implemented somehow, but I am not sure how we can do it within the product itself. Can you help me out?
Late arriving dimension handling is the case where your fact table receives information before your dimension table does. As a result, it fails to get the surrogate key from the dimensions during execution and the job fails.
Astera DWBuilder offers a feature called ‘Placeholder’ dimension role. This can be implemented in the dimensions which are subject to delayed updates. All a user needs to do is to create one Boolean field and assign the role ‘Placeholder’ to that field. See the screenshot below.
Next time, when the fact tries to fetch a surrogate key for a business key that does not yet exist, this dimension will create a placeholder record for that business key with dummy values and return the surrogate key to this record.
Note that the value in the placeholder field will be ‘true’ for placeholder records, and the next time when dimension loader is fed with real information for this business key, the placeholder record will get updated with new info and the value in placeholder field will turn to ‘false’ again.