Jason-299789 (9/4/2012)

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Jeff Moden (9/3/2012)

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rka (9/2/2012)

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DateKey has to be in the format YYYYMMDD

In SQL Server, that's a pretty insane requirement because that would make a character based date. Since you're using SQL Server 2008, you should either use DATETIME or DATE datatypes for such a thing.

I strongly recommmend you talk to the people that designed the table and suggest that they should probably change it.

As for actually building the table... what have you tried that's not working?

Jeff I agree its pretty insane,

But I've seen this especially if the YYYYMMDD is converted to an INT eg 20120101 = 20,120,101.

Its been a frequent topic of discussion on various DW projects that I've worked on, prior to the Date Data type most of the calendar dims used the DateTime with the PK/SK column a CAST(CalendarDate as Int), again a pretty nasty way of doing this especially if you have a time element due to the rounding issues.

However, since 2008 I've been converted to Date Data type as the PK/SK and it seems to work very well.