Wednesday, 8 August 2012

What is a Date Dimension in OBIEE ?With Examples

We come accross Date dimension mostly while working in Data warehousing.To make this post I have referred"The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling - By Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross"
The date dimension is the one dimension nearly guaranteed to be in every data mart because virtually every data mart is a time series. In fact, date is usually the first dimension in the underlying sort order of the database so that the successive loading of time intervals of data is placed into virgin territory on the disk.Unlike most of our other dimensions, we can build the date dimension table in advance. We may put 5 or 10 years of rows representing days in the table so that we can cover the history we have stored, as well as several years in the future. Even 10 years’ worth of days is only about 3,650 rows, which is a relatively small dimension table. For a daily date dimension table in a retail environment, we recommend the partial list of columns shown in Figure


Date Key (PK)
Date
Full Date Description
Day of Week
Day Number in Epoch
Week Number in Epoch
Month Number in Epoch
Day Number in Calendar Month
Day Number in Calendar Year
Day Number in Fiscal Month
Day Number in Fiscal Year
Last Day in Week Indicator
Last Day in Month Indicator
Calendar Week Ending Date
Calendar Week Number in Year
Calendar Month Name
Calendar Month Number in Year
Calendar Year-Month (YYYY-MM)
Calendar Quarter......

 
Each column in the date dimension table is defined by the particular day that the row represents. The day-of-week column contains the name of the day, such as Monday. This column would be used to create reports comparing the business on Mondays with Sunday business. The day number in calendar month column starts with 1 at the beginning of each month and runs to 28, 29, 30, or 31, depending on the month. This column is useful for comparing the same day each month. Similarly, we could have a month number in year (1, ... , 12)..
The holiday indicator takes on the values of Holiday or Nonholiday. Remember that the dimension table attributes serve as report labels. Simply populating the holiday indicator with a Y or an N ould be far less useful. Imagine a report where we’re comparing holiday sales for a given product versus nonholiday sales.
A similar argument holds true for the weekday indicator, which would have a value of Weekday or Weekend. Saturdays and Sundays obviously would be assigned the Weekend value. Of course, multiple date table attributes can be jointly constrained, so we can easily compare weekday holidays with weekend holidays, for example.The selling season column is set to the name of the retailing season, if any.Examples in the United States could include Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter,Valentine’s Day, Fourth of July, or None. 

Some designers pause at this point to ask why an explicit date dimension table is needed.The reason that if the date key in the fact table is a date-type field,then any SQL query can directly constrain on the fact table date key and use natural SQL date semantics to filter on month or year while avoiding a supposedly expensive join. This reasoning falls apart for several reasons.
  •  First of all, if our relational database can’t handle an efficient join to the date dimension table, we’re already in deep trouble.
  • Also, on the performance front, most databases don’t index SQL date calculations, so queries constraining on an SQL-calculated field wouldn’t take advantage of an index.
  • In terms of usability, the typical business user is not versed in SQL date semantics,so he or she would be unable to directly leverage inherent capabilities associated with a date data type. SQL date functions do not support filtering by attributes such as weekdays versus weekends, holidays, fiscal periods, seasons, or major events. Presuming that the business needs to slice data by these nonstandard date attributes, then an explicit date dimension table is essential
Also read about Factless fact in Datawarehouse

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