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I have the following master records that consolidate to one golden record:

Day 1 

Day 2

Problem

The system field UpdateDate doesn't work in this consolidation strategy. When a new record is submitted, the UpdateDate can be nonsensical because the last record in has an UpdateDate of NULL and the older record has an UpdateDate. For example:

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This case statement includes the else clause which will take care of publishers that are not A, B, or C. That should answer your question about Pub D.

Note

If you simply have Pub A, Pub B and Pub C, and you want to want to make sure the "last one in" wins for each publisher and you are OK with using a Preferred Publisher strategy, then you can just add the expression SourceUpdateDate desc in the Additional Order By field as a tiebreaker instead of using this Custom SemQL consolidation strategy. It still requires you to go through step 1-4 but you don't need to configure a Custom Ranking consolidation rule.