Calculating today's date using the string functions

Calculating today's date is one of those problems every BI developer encounters sooner or later. It is also a repeatedly asked question on Internet forums; probably because books don't cover this topic at at all, or at least, not with concrete examples.

The Date dimension in the Adventure Works DW 2012 SSAS database has dates only up to December 31, 2010. If we are creating a current date expression that is after December 31, 2010, then the expression will not be valid. To overcome this little inconvenience, we will use string functions to only get the day and month of the current date, with the year being shifted to any year we need to.

In fact, this approach can not only explain the concept, well but also is generic enough so that you can apply it in your own SSAS database.

We are covering this intriguing topic in three recipes.

This recipe demonstrates the most intuitive technique of doing it, that is, generating today's date as a string...