Placeholder added to a dimension when a fact load meets a natural key that doesn't exist yet. Attributes are marked Unknown and a flag records it as inferred, so the later dimension load can fill in the real values.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Inferred member in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- ELT
Extract, load, transform: raw data lands in the target system first and is transformed there. See ETL for the opposite order.
- Natural key
Uses an identifier the source already carries, an order number for instance, rather than one generated later. Learn prefers natural keys, if stable, to generated surrogates, since they work well for joins and clustering.
- VALUES
Returns in DAX the distinct column values, or table rows, still visible after filters are applied, sometimes with an extra blank entry. CALCULATE often takes the result as a table filter.