Maintaining a data historization is a very common but time consuming task in a data warehouse environment. You face it while loading historized Core-Layer (also known as Enterprise Data Warehouse or Foundation Layer), Data Vault Models, Slowly Changing Dimensions, etc. The common techniques used involve outer joins and some kind of change detection. This change detection must be done with respect of Null-values and is possibly the most trickiest part. A very good overview by Dani Schnider can be found in his blog: Delta Detection in Oracle SQL

But, on the other hand, SQL offers standard functionality with exactly desired behaviour: Group By or Partitioning with analytic functions. Can it be used for this task? Does it make sense? And how would the ETL process look like? Can we further speed up the task using partition exchange and when does it make sense? I’ll look at this in the next few posts. Continue reading →