I always read articles about date and time dimensions; just to see how they compare to the script I take with me wherever I go, just to see if there’s something else I could incorporate or do different. Recently (based on articles I’ve seen here, apart form ‘The Sins of Old: Time_T’, which was fun reading the discussion) I’ve been questioning some of the things I include in my date and time dimension.

Does anyone else include descriptions apart form day and month? I know descriptions can be constructed in analysis services when creating the dim but I choose to keep descriptions like ‘Fri 01/01/2010’ and ‘Jan 2010’ and even ‘11:59 pm - 12:00 am’ in the relative date and time dimension and include that field as the dimension description. I didn’t choose this approach for performance or disc space I chose it for personal preference.

So I was wondering does anyone else keep their dimension ‘long descriptions’ in their SQL tables and if not is there a reason?