Which solution meets the requirements for maintaining a full record of all changes from CDC logs while also recording only the most recent values?

The choice of ingesting all logs into a bronze table and using MERGE INTO for the current values is the most effective solution for maintaining a full record of all changes from Change Data Capture (CDC) logs while simultaneously recording only the most recent values.

This approach allows for the efficient separation of historical data from the most up-to-date records. When you ingest logs into a bronze table, you are capturing every change in its entirety—this historical data can be invaluable for auditing purposes, tracking changes over time, and analyzing trends. By employing the MERGE INTO operation afterward, you can consolidate updates into a separate target table that contains only the latest values for each primary key. MERGE INTO provides a mechanism to update or insert records based on whether they already exist, aligning perfectly with the requirement to have the most recent entries available while preserving the full history in the bronze layer.

Overall, this solution effectively balances the need for comprehensive historical logs with the necessity of having a clean, up-to-date view of the current state of the data, making it a robust choice for data management in data engineering scenarios.