Date Dimensions Part 2

Question

Date Dimensions Part 2

VincentRainardi

SSCrazy

Points: 2905
More actions
February 18, 2009 at 12:27 am

#205741

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Date Dimensions Part 2

Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply

Rick Todd Hall of Fame Points: 3302 More actions · Answer 1

Thanks for the great series (if 2 = series) on Date Dimensions. It certainly relates to me, as to just about any Data Warehouse developer. I definitely learned some great tricks that I use regularly now, in both articles.

One question: have you found a good solution for moving dates that you can use in Excel 2007 Pivot Tables? Basically a way to tag "yesterday", "this month", "last week", etc., that a user can then create and publish a report with one of those dates as a filter, and when they reload and refresh the report it will maintain the correct date range?

Thanks again,

Rick Todd

VincentRainardi SSCrazy Points: 2905 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks Rick.

We can create a calculated member such as Yesterday and Last Month like this:

with member [Transaction Date].[Date].[Yesterday] as

members("[Transaction Date].[Date].&[" + Format(DateAdd("d",-1,now()),"yyyy-MM-dd") + "]")

select [Transaction Date].[Date].[Yesterday] on rows,

[Measures].[Amount] on columns

from [Cube];

with member [Transaction Date].[Month].[Last Month] as

members("[Transaction Date].[Month].&[" + Format(DateAdd("m",-1,now()),"MMMM yyyy") + "]")

select [Transaction Date].[Month].[Last Month] on rows,

[Measures].[Amount] on columns

from [Cube];

Rick Todd Hall of Fame Points: 3302 More actions · Answer 3

Anything simple like that for This Week? Not having the "ww" type functionality in the FORMAT(NOW()) makes it a lot more complicated, and googling doesn't seem to bring up anything useful.

Rick Todd

Rick Todd Hall of Fame Points: 3302 More actions · Answer 4

It looks like to build this into the cube, I have to build them as Sets. This is nice from a presentation perspective, in that they show up in the Sets section in Excel 2007 for their respective dimensions, but means I can't use more than one at the same time.

Am I missing something, and I don't have to build them as Sets?

Rick Todd

VincentRainardi SSCrazy Points: 2905 More actions · Answer 5

Hi Rick,

1. If the week attribute is in yyyy-ww format, we can use datepart() for [This Week]:

with member [Transaction Date].[Week].[This Week] as

StrToMember("[Transaction Date].[Week].&[" + cstr(datepart("yyyy",now())) +

"-" + right("0"+cstr(datepart("ww",now())),2) + "]")

select [Transaction Date].[Week].[This Week] on rows,

[Measures].[Amount] on columns

from [Cube];

2. It's member not set. The member definition is between "as" and "select".

Ref:

1. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/20ee97hz.aspx

2. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms146084.aspx