Time votes

Peter Scott

Oct 21, 2005 • 1 min read

Yesterday my thoughts returned to the topic of time, not in the Stephen Hawkin sense but the more prosaic "Data Warehouse" sense. Three questions popped up, and although I hold firm views about the answers I think there are others out there with the opposite view and indeed a lot with the 'it depends' view.

Firstly, can you envisage a commercially useful data warehouse that does not have a time dimension? And if 'YES' give an example - No vote on this one as I would like comment

Second part (and a vote): I recently read a book that gave an example of the time entity for a data warehouse as:

Time_id number Day# number Year# number Day varchar2(16) Month varchar2(16) Year varchar2(32)

Of course this is just an example and in a real DW there may well be other attributes in use such as day_of _week, is_work_day, season. But the thing that strikes me is that the basic entity does not use the DATE type. So my question here is do you use the DATE data type in your time dimension?

Do you always include the DATE data type in a time dimension
Give your opinionYesNo
Current results

And lastly, and not wishing to bring up the the surrogate key debate on the Dizwell forum, the specific question is there a place for a surrogate key in the TIME dimension?

Is there a place for a surrogate time key?
Give your opinionYesNo
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