Good article on a key topic for db/warehouse developers like me.

It seems that from a maintenance viewpoint, it would be much easier to define all of the variations on the main date as computed fields. Adding date formats and derived dates is as simple as adding a calculated field to the table.

We have several significant data collection and reporting systems and various data sources which use various date formats (including mainframes where records are defined with YY fields and MM fields - text and int types, combined and split). Any date fields in a data table can be joined to the date table on the appropriate date field(s) and of course we always try to store the resulting records in a Sql native datetime field.

Seems like this provides the performance benefits of joining to a table along with the super-simple maintenance - there is only one step on one field when adding months to the table.

Cheers!