I thought I would put this here because I have just made these the standards for BIDA.
In BIDA we shall have 0 as the ‘unknown’ record for dimension tables and association tables as ever.
In BIDA we shall now have 1 as the TOTAL record key for any multi-level dimension table.
The prior standard has been 999999999 which was what Ralph Kimball defined many years ago.
However, this gets in the way of such operations as “max key allocated”.
So we shall have 1 as the total record and 1 will be placed in the ag9 column of multi-level dimension tables.