Creating a Simple Date Dimension Using Recursive Common Table Expressions (CTE)

In this post I’ll explain how to create a simple date dimension to use it in your data warehouses and your BI solutions. So, this article is for you if you need a fast and easy way to make a simple date dimension that supports the most commonly used date elements like

·         Integer date key

·         Different date formats

·         Quarter

·         Month names

·         Week numbers

·         Day of the week

·         Day of the year

·         Is day end of month

·         Not available (N/A) row

Due to the fact that there are lots of fellows that are still using SQL Server 2008 and earlier, I put the codes that support SQL Server 2008  as well as SQL Server 2012. But, I’ve commented the 2008 lines.

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Digging into SQL Server 2012 columnstore index

The SQL Server 11.0 release (code named “Denali”) introduces a new data warehouse query acceleration feature based on a new type of index called the columnstore. Columnstore indexing is officially announced in SQL Server 2012. It is working based on xVelocity memory optimised technology and it improves data warehouse query performance significantly. Due to the fact that data warehousing, decision support systems and business intelligence applications are growing very quickly, we need to be able to read and process very large data sets quickly and accurately into useful information and knowledge. Columnstore index technology is especially appropriate for data warehousing data sets. It improves the common data warehousing queries’ performance significantly.

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