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GulianiG's avatar
GulianiG
Helper II
2 years ago
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Can Text Keys affect Performance?

Hi Experts,  I came across conflicting information about storing keys for relationship as Text vs Whole Number I benefit from having it as Text data type because it helps be debug errors easily as ...
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  • danextian's avatar
    danextian
    2 years ago

    Hi GulianiG 

     

    I am not sure about data modeling performance but that kind of key will definitely lead to a longer refresh time which may be negligible depending on the data size. Why longer? Because that will cause a higher cardinality and will take a longer time to write  into memory as opposed to having two separate dimensions for ID and Date. Also, a higher cardinality requires more storage. That is why it also a best practice to split a datetime column into date and time columns or just remove the time component if not needed.

danextian's avatar
danextian
Super User
2 years ago

Hi GulianiG 

 

I am not sure about data modeling performance but that kind of key will definitely lead to a longer refresh time which may be negligible depending on the data size. Why longer? Because that will cause a higher cardinality and will take a longer time to write  into memory as opposed to having two separate dimensions for ID and Date. Also, a higher cardinality requires more storage. That is why it also a best practice to split a datetime column into date and time columns or just remove the time component if not needed.