In SAS Data Integration Studio, the default values for generated surrogate and retained keys contain which type of values?

Question

Options

• Adatetime values
• Balpha-numeric values
• Cbinary values
• Dinteger values

• A
  6% (2)
• B
  3% (1)
• D
  92% (33)

Explanation

In SAS Data Integration Studio, surrogate keys and retained keys are generated as sequential integer values (D), typically starting at 1 and incrementing by 1 - this is the standard data warehousing approach where surrogate keys serve as simple, compact numeric identifiers for dimension table rows.

• A (datetime) is wrong because datetime values are timestamps, not identifiers; dates have no role in key generation logic here.
• B (alpha-numeric) is wrong because surrogate keys are purely numeric - mixing letters would complicate joins and indexing.
• C (binary) is wrong because binary is a storage/encoding concept, not a key value type used in SAS DI Studio key generation.

Memory tip: Think "surrogate = sequence" - surrogate keys replace natural keys with the simplest possible unique value, and nothing is simpler than counting up with integers: 1, 2, 3...

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