Late-Arriving Dimensions: The Inferred Member

The interviewer says: 'A fact row arrives but the dimension it references does not exist yet. What do you do?' This is the inferred member question, and it separates candidates who have built dimension loading pipelines from candidates who have only designed schemas. The wrong answers are 'skip the fact' and 'queue it for later.' The Pattern: Inferred Members Your inferred member answer: 'I insert a placeholder row into dim_customer with customer_id = C999, name = Unknown, city = Unknown, is_inferred = TRUE. The fact loads immediately with a valid SK. When the real dimension arrives hours or days later, I update the placeholder with actual attributes and set is_inferred = FALSE.' Walk through both steps. The interviewer is checking whether you know the two-phase pattern: placeholder now, b