Late Arriving Dimension/Early Arriving Fact as the name implies is a dimension record which is not available when the ETL loads the related fact record but becomes available at a later time.
This scenario could happen for a variety of reasons;
- It might be a perfectly valid business process. For e.g. in an emergency ward, the patient interventions could be recorded first as priority while the patient details that is collected could be recorded into the system at a later time.
- Sometimes due to operational reasons, the data might arrive at different times from their respective source systems. For e.g. The dimensions could be extracted from Master Data repository while the facts are extracted directly from the transaction system at different periods.
- It might be due a failed ETL run.
Benny Austin 