What is a surrogate key?

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A surrogate key is a system-generated (non-meaningful from a business perspective) primary key for purposes of ensuring uniqueness within a database table. Surrogates for DW are usually created during the Delta processing within the ETL layer. Uniqueness is usually driven by referencing one or more data elements from the source table that are considered proper rules for ensuring uniqueness. Surrogates are usually numeric data elements and many times will take advantage of the database sequencer object or the ETL tools sequence transformation object.