Unique ID Generator

The Unique ID Generator stage creates a unique key that identifies a specific record. A unique ID is crucial for data warehouse initiatives in which transactions may not carry all name and address data, but must be attributed to the same record or contact. A unique ID may be implemented at the individual, household, business, and premises level. Unique ID Generator provides a variety of algorithms to create unique IDs.

The unique ID is based on either a sequential number or date and time stamp. In addition, you can optionally use a variety of algorithms to generate data to appended to the ID, thereby increasing the likelihood that the ID will be unique. The sequential number or date and time stamp IDs are required and cannot be removed from the generated ID.

Unique ID Generator can be used to generate a non-unique key using one of the key generation algorithms. In non-unique mode, you can create keys to use for matching. This may be useful in a data warehouse where you have already added keys to a dimension and you want to generate a key for new records in order to see if the new records match an existing record.

This example shows that each record in the input is assigned a sequential record ID in the output.

The Unique ID stage produces a field named RecordID which contains the unique ID. You can rename the RecordID field as required.