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IBM Cognos 8 Platform => COGNOS 8 => BI Modeling (Transformer) => Topic started by: dssd on 23 Oct 2012 12:50:04 PM

Title: Time Dimension
Post by: dssd on 23 Oct 2012 12:50:04 PM
Why do we build time dimension, what is the benefit of using the date wizard rather than building the dimension using the normal way?
Title: Re: Time Dimension
Post by: cognostechie on 23 Oct 2012 01:58:54 PM
Use the Date wizard to build a Time dimension and you will see the difference. Time dimension automatically creates lot of relative Time categories which the regular dimension does NOT. Those categories are extremely valuable for analytics.
Title: Re: Time Dimension
Post by: bdbits on 25 Oct 2012 03:11:41 PM
I have no problem with the date wizard generated dim, but here we have a custom conformed time dim table we use for all our dates. It has all the items in the generated time dim. In addition, we have a few dozen different attributes on it, and can and often do build multiple alternate drill-down paths, e.g. year->quarter->month->day, fiscal-year->fiscal-quarter->month->day, etc.

So it just depends on what you need.