Re: On view updating

"mAsterdam" <mAsterdam_at_vrijdag.org> wrote in message news:41556590$0$43451$e4fe514c_at_news.xs4all.nl...

> In my experience, when companies with very similar
> businesess merge, the bigger company's database
> (and software) wins, after adding some subtleties
> to cater for the most urgent features of the smaller.
> The rest ceases to exist.
> This is called 'product harmonisation'.

Sometimes, it's the "winning company" in the merger.

The classic merger case is an airline takeover by another airline. They both use "employee_id", but the two are now incompatible. We need to keep track of both the prior history, and the new status quo.

If you're building a data warehouse, it behooves you to anticipate this scenario. That's one reason why a DW architect might use a surrogate key, in a situation where an ODS architect might use a natural key. Received on Sat Sep 25 2004 - 07:44:50 CDT