Building a Calendar dimension

In this recipe, we will create a Fiscal calendar using the CALENDAR dimension functionality in Essbase Studio. The Calendar dimension was a long awaited function in Essbase. Prior to the Calendar dimension, you had to create your own template in an Essbase cube. When you were designing another cube, you would simply copy that dimension from one outline to the next. This worked fine if you only had to worry about a simple Gregorian calendar, but it was slightly more challenging for retail, broadcast calendars, or fiscal calendars. In this recipe, we will be building the 4-5-4 fiscal calendar for a retail company. The retail calendar comes from the National Federation Retailer and is designed to track year over year data across multiple years. The 4-5-4 is the pattern that is used in the quarters. Using this pattern, the first month of the quarter will have four weeks, the second month five weeks, and the last month has four weeks. This calendar also takes into...