You need to choose the appropriate key to use when designing a dimension table based on the Customer table. What should you do?

A surrogate key is a system-generated, typically integer-based key that uniquely identifies each row in a dimension table independently of source system values. It enables slowly changing dimension (SCD) tracking by allowing multiple versions of the same entity without impacting fact table foreign keys. Surrogate keys decouple the data warehouse from source system key changes, deletions, or reuse, ensuring long-term referential integrity.

Natural keys from source systems can change, be reused, or contain nulls over time, making them unreliable as stable, permanent dimension identifiers.

Using CustomerNumber ties the dimension directly to the source system business key, which cannot support slowly changing dimension scenarios if that value is ever updated or reassigned.

A concatenated key of CustomerName and CustomerNumber is inefficient for joins, grows unnecessarily large, and still inherits the instability problems of both source system natural keys.

CustomerName is not guaranteed to be unique across all customers and can change due to legal name changes or data entry corrections, making it unsuitable as a primary key.