Press "Enter" to skip to content

Slowly-Changing Dimensions in the Serverless SQL Pool

Lilliam Leme is building a serverless warehouse:

As organizations continue to collect and store large volumes of data in their data lakes, managing this data effectively becomes increasingly important. One key aspect of this is implementing Slow Change Dimension type 2, which allows organizations to track historical data by creating multiple records for a given natural key in the dimensional tables with separate surrogate keys and/or different version numbers. In this blog post we will address the following scenario: a customer wants to implement Slow Change Dimension type 2 on top of their data lake.

For this example, we will use Serverless SQL Pool to demonstrate how this can be done. Additionally, in the next post, we will explore how the same approach can be used with Spark.

This turns out to be more work than a classic SQL Server-based solution because of the fact that the serverless SQL pool is read-only, save for CETAS statements.