Preparing the Date Dimension via the Query Editor

While not strictly required, a date dimension is strongly recommended for almost all semantic models, and particularly those that require date intelligence calculations (e.g., Year-to-Date, Year-over-Year) as well as organizations that use fiscal calendars. A complete date table accounts for all the required grains or hierarchy levels of both the standard (Gregorian) calendar and any fiscal calendar specific to the organization, such as year, quarter, month, week, and day. Additionally, surrogate key columns aligned with each grain are included to drive the sort order of report attributes and to enable date intelligence expressions.

Building and supporting a robust date table within a source system, such as a data warehouse, provides significant long-term value across BI projects and tools. However, in many BI environments, BI developers only have read access to source systems and requests for even seemingly simple changes to source...