Working with Date Measures
Date measures enable members to be associated with date-type values. The ability to process dates in the measures dimension can be useful for types of analysis that are difficult to represent using the Time dimension.
For example, an application that analyzes asset depreciation may need to track acquisition dates for a series of capital assets. The company has been in business for fifty years, so the acquisition dates span too large a period to allow for feasible Time dimension modeling (the Time dimension only covers five years).
In addition to their ability to represent values spanning large time periods, date measures can also capture date values with smaller granularity than is captured in the Time dimension, such as hours and minutes.
Implementing Date Measures
Date measures are supported for aggregate and block storage databases. You create date measures at the database level.
Use the following workflow to enable and use date measures:
-
In the outline properties, enable typed measures.
-
In the outline properties, select a date format (for example,
yyyy-mm-dd). All date measures in the outline must use the same format. -
Create a date measure in the outline (in the Accounts dimension), and in the member properties, define it as type Date.
For example, in ASOsamp.Sample, you can enable typed measures for the outline, select a date format, and add a measure named IntroDate defined as type Date.
The date values are stored internally as numeric values, although you load them into Essbase as formatted date strings. When queried, date measures are displayed according to the selected date format.
See Performing Database Operations on Text and Date Measures.
The following configuration setting is useful for tuning data exports of date measures, MAXDATE.