To Surrogate Key or Not...

Implement Surrogate Keys Using Lakehouse and Azure Synapse Analytics

This tutorial is part of the series of posts dedicated to the building end-to-end Lakehouse solutions, based on Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics.

https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/7136/surrogate-keys-azure-synapse-analytics-data-warehouse/

Surrogate key transformation in mapping data flow

Data flows are available both in Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Pipelines. This article applies to mapping data flows. If you are new to transformations, please refer to the introductory article Transform data using a mapping data flow.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/data-flow-surrogate-key

What is surrogate key?

A surrogate key is a unique identifier or placeholder value that is used to identify an entity in a database table. It is called a surrogate key because it serves as a substitute for a natural key, which is a unique identifier that is more meaningful in the context of the data. Surrogate keys are often used in databases to ensure that each row in a table has a unique identifier, even if the natural key is not guaranteed to be unique.

Surrogate keys can be either generated automatically by the database system, or they can be assigned manually by a user or application. They are often used in conjunction with other keys, such as natural keys and foreign keys, to help organize and maintain the data in a database.