Server Time Dimensions
As we built our original Northwind Sales cube in the previous chapter, you might have thought that building a special dimension table for the Time dimension was a bit wasteful. After all, the concept of time is fairly universal, and there’s a limited set of possible attributes and hierarchies that might be needed, any of which could be easily keyed off a date field in the fact table rather than an arbitrary time key.
In Analysis Services 2000, the concept of a date column–derived time dimension was very basic and easily implemented. Analysis Services 2005 and 2008 enhanced this facility, but its use is slightly less obvious. The new implementation of such time dimensions is based on a server-generated pseudo-dimension table ...
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