Handle a late arriving dimension without breaking the fact table

A sale comes in before the customer record does, and my fact table has nowhere to point the foreign key.

Intermediate to advancedRead 7 minDoing: an afternoon7 steps

What you'll have at the end

A placeholder dimension row that lets today's sale load right away, then gets overwritten with the real customer values once they arrive, with the fact table itself never rewritten.

Before you start

You need

A fact table that already loads through a surrogate-key lookup against its dimensions, and a load job you can add a check to before that lookup runs.

Not covered

Backdating a Type 2 dimension's own change history, or holding a fact in a separate suspense table until its dimension shows up.

Leans on

7 steps

Where to go next

Preserve customer history with a Type 2 slowly changing dimension

once the real customer record lands on a dimension tracked as Type 2, a later plan change still needs its own new version row; that is the ordinary process, not this one-time correction.

Checked 25 Aug 2026

Part of the Kimball Data Modeling cookbook