Surrogate Key / Business Key - which should be used in model?

[jd8766]

Hello, just looking for advise really..

I am building an SSAS Tabular model which will link to my PBI..  the model will only contain a small chunk of data regarding sales.

The production tables themselves are structured quite well.. each with their own primary key and foreign keys to link to the appropriate dimensions. My question is, is it completely nessecary for me to build a process to add my own surrogate keys to tables that are already structured well enough to be pulled into SSAS tabular? I am thinking I could just eliminate some processing time if I go straight from source to SSAS without a pipeline inbetween which adds surrogate keys.

Would it be OK to do this... or is it not the best practice?

[amitchandak]

@jd8766 ,if SSAS tabular model is working fine, then you can simply use it. If keys are already numeric no action is needed. If they are not and have a performance issue because of large data then you should think about that.

The best practice is to have numeric(whole number) join keys