Thank you for writing this article, Harsh. It's a good article. I learned about the version number from your article; I've used effective and expiry date and current version column but I have come across the version number, so thanks for the valuable input.

I tend to agree with David that using identity is better than GUID or max+1. As David correctly say if we use max+1 we could have problem when loading in parallel. I've seen an application (not DW though, it was an OLTP) used max+1 to generate ID and we experienced contention and locking problems. Last year when building a DW in a project somebody suggested to use GUID and we decided not too because of the same reason as David mentioned, i.e. performance. Not on the dimension tables, but performance of the fact table as fact tables have many SKs columns. I used big int sometimes for customer and product dimensions but all other dimensions normal int usually sufficient.

Looking forward to your next article.

Kind regards,

Vincent