Introduction

Time–handling features are an important part of every Business Intelligence (BI) system. Programming languages, database systems, they all incorporate various time-related functions and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is no exception there. In fact, that's one of its main strengths.

The MDX language has various time-related functions designed to work with a special type of dimension called Time and its typed attributes. While it's true that some of those functions work with any type of dimension, their usefulness is most obvious when applied to time-type dimensions. An additional prerequisite is the existence of multi-level hierarchies, also known as user hierarchies, in which types of levels must be set correctly or some of the time-related functions will either give false results or will not work at all.

Because of the reasons described earlier, and the fact that almost every cube will have one or more time dimensions, we've decided to dedicate...