DimTime Archives - Turning data into powerful insights

27 December 2016Ousama EL HOR Comment

MDX functions based on time

A bit of MDX to start the week, it feels good?

As you have already seen in the title, the purpose of this article is to share with you some time-based MDX functions that are very useful.

Time is an essential component for business analysis. Analysts interpret the state of the business now, often relative to what it was in the past, in order to understand what it might be in the future.

To support this, Analysis Services provides a number of time-based MDX functions, here are some of them:

Create a Time dimension with SSAS (DimTime) - Part 2

After creating our DimTime table in the 1^st part of this article, we will now make some improvements on our dimension.

From experience, I would recommend using a key PKDate int type in format yyyymmdd.

This type of key will allow you to get better performance.

This codification in yyyymmdd format should be generalized to all levels of our time axis: year, semester, quarter, month, week ... I therefore suggest that each level (year, semester, quarter, month, week, day) be made up of three distinct attributes:

--
Reserve
Name

2 July 2016Ousama EL HOR No Comments

Create a Time dimension with SSAS (DimTime) - 1st part

The dimension Time (DimTime) plays a very important role in a decision-making system, its presence is obligatory in the tables of facts which characterizes a decision-making system compared to a transactional system.

In the rest of this article, we will create the table DimTime using an SSAS project wizard.