Forum Discussion
Helper IIShould Date Keys be used as Numbers or Dates?
Hi GulianiG
I personally prefer 20210331 as it is easier to understand - easier understanding leads to easier troubleshooting, debugging or whatever the proper term is. With 43402 I would have to go to Excel, paste that and change the format to date to find out that it meant Oct 29, 2018 - additional non-value adding steps. But why not just use dates instead of keys and also, I think, the bigger question is why combine employee ID & Date? They are normally separate dimensions.
It is on a case-to-case basis. There is no one size fits all approach. Of course, having those two combined means a higher cardinality as opposed to having just two separate columns. A higher cardinality, requires a longer refresh time as it also takes longer to write it into memory.
Super UserHi GulianiG
I personally prefer 20210331 as it is easier to understand - easier understanding leads to easier troubleshooting, debugging or whatever the proper term is. With 43402 I would have to go to Excel, paste that and change the format to date to find out that it meant Oct 29, 2018 - additional non-value adding steps. But why not just use dates instead of keys and also, I think, the bigger question is why combine employee ID & Date? They are normally separate dimensions.
GulianiGdanextian Are there no performance concerns of making it longer, given that it would be stored as Text because I want a separator(_) between ID & Date
I need to combine employee ID and date because I am creating a reporting line based on an employee joining the organization till he terminates. He/ she changes multiple supervisors during the period. This lineage helps us establish the leadership hierarchy the employee was working under for a given month end- danextian
It is on a case-to-case basis. There is no one size fits all approach. Of course, having those two combined means a higher cardinality as opposed to having just two separate columns. A higher cardinality, requires a longer refresh time as it also takes longer to write it into memory.