Building Basic Dimensions and Cubes - Expert Cube Development with SSAS Multidimensional Models - page 49

Configuring a Time dimension
Building a Time dimension is really just the same as building a regular dimension,
although there are a few extra properties that need to be set. Going back to the
Select Creation Method step of the Dimension wizard, you'll see that several of
the available options are specifically for building Time dimensions, but we still
recommend that you do not use them and construct a Time dimension yourself;
they're only useful for proof-of-concepts. Getting SSDT to build and populate a Time
dimension table in your data source can be useful as a quick way to get started on
building your own dimension. However, it's very likely that you'll want to make
changes to what the wizard creates, not just because it uses a DateTime column as
a primary key rather than an integer. The option to generate a Time dimension on
the server—so that there is no relational data source needed—suffers from the same
problems, but is even more inflexible since there's no way to customize things such
as member name formats beyond the options the wizard gives you. There are a lot
of resources on the Web that can help you with building your own Time dimension
table, such as the one shown at http://tinyurl.com/BuildTimeDim .
The important thing to do with a Time dimension is to tell Analysis Services that
it is in fact a Time dimension, so you can access some of the special functionality
that Analysis Services has in this area. You can do this by setting the dimension's
Type property to Time and then setting attributes' Type property to the nearest
approximation of what they represent, as shown in the following screenshot. So, for
a Year attribute you would set Type to Years , a Month attribute to Months , and so on.