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What is the standard practice for adding a new dimension (a totally new table, not a new row to an exisiting dimension table)? Wouldn't you have to redo the entire fact table, to add a new field, and then populate it based on the surrogate key in your new dimension table? Any simpler ways to do this?

M.R.
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As long as the new dimension does not alter the grain of any of your fact tables, it should not be a problem to add a new dimension. If any of the existing fact table records are non-applicable to the new dimension, simply populate the new foreign key column with the dummy key in those cases.

Remember to check the overhead related to your fact tables that require the new dimensional key, and scale it according to the number of existing records in each fact table.

Datajam
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