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mmace1's avatar
mmace1
Icon for Impactful Individual rankImpactful Individual
5 years ago

Replace GUID keys with Surrogate Keys in Data Model. Thoughts?

GUIDS are large, so take a lot of space / aren't the most efficient join. But if that's all you have - you can, in Power Query, switch them out for surrogate keys you make yourself. Though, I've...
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lbendlin's avatar
lbendlin
Icon for Super User rankSuper User
5 years ago

Meh. How many rows are we talking? Millions? Billions? Power BI keeps everything in memory (assuming import mode) so the UX performance gain will likely (easily) be eaten up by the extended ETL timing.

  • mmace1's avatar
    mmace1
    Icon for Impactful Individual rankImpactful Individual
    5 years ago

    Fact table is quite a few millions, with several GUIDs. 

    Effectively I've already decided to get some surrogates on database side.  I don't know how the join peformance will be impacted, but it'll help keep some of our data models smaller (We're a non-Premium shop, so limited to 1GB). 

    But was just curious in general if anyone had any experience / input.  i.e. - that you don't think the join speed would be all that affected is interesting.