SCD is a basically a concept that explains how historical data/values are stored within a data in a database.

There are three main scenarios namely Type I, Type II and Type III.

In this post, I will be discussing the Type I scenario and I promise to do the part 2 pretty soon. In Type I SCD, the old values in one or more attributes of the table are overwritten with new values thus the old not kept. To explain this further, let’s consider a simple employee data structure as shown below;

Figure I

BEFORE

AFTER

Figure I above shows the before state and the after state of the employee’s (John Lee) department information

It shows John’s department was changed from HR to IT. (NB: Click both Images to enlarge)

This change could be as a result of data being erroneously entered and from figure 1 it is clear that there is no way of tracking historical data once the data changes have been implemented. In this case, there is no way of telling what John’s former department was.

This is part 1 in my post on demystifying SCD, please stay tune for part 2 of this post.

Thank you