Dimensions are sets of attributes useful for describing a business. A list of products along with their shape, color, or size is a typical example of dimension. The time dimension is a special dimension used for describing a business in terms of when things happened. Just think of a time dimension as a list of dates along with attributes describing those dates. For example, given the date 05/08/2009
, you know that it is a day of August
, it belongs to the third quarter
and it is Wednesday
. These are some of the attributes for that date.
In the following tutorial you will create a transformation that generates the dataset for a time dimension. The dataset for a time dimension has one row for every date in a given range of dates and one column for each attribute of the date.