Combining multiple tables with valid from/to date ranges into a single dimension

Tracking historical changes within a dimension is a common task in data warehousing and well covered by Ralph Kimball's slowly changing dimension (SCD) methods. In short, the SCD methods proposed by Ralph Kimball assume, that the source system (for example the ERP system) doesn't keep historical versions of its data records, so changes need to be detected at the time when data is loaded into the warehouse. To keep historical values, versions of the master data records are created to memorize each state of the original record together with a valid from/to timestamp so that fact data can be joined to corresponding dimension data. But the valid from/to dates are usually not a good idea for joining fact data to the associated dimensions because this would result in range lookups (ETL) or date range (between) joins (in SQL or ELT). The surrogate key concepts offers a good solution here, by assigning a unique key (the surrogate key) to each version of a record. Now, this key can be used as a direct inner join from the fact table to its dimensions. This approach moves the time consuming process of resolving date ranges from query time to data loading time, so it has to be performed only once. Query performance now benefits from the simplified link structure between the tables.