DATE

In the Ultra Transcenders books

DBX-DEP

Each book explains DATE in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• CALENDAR

  Generates a date table as a calculated table: given a start and end date, this DAX function returns a single column, called Date, listing every day in between, including both ends.

• Serverless

  Compute tier for single Azure SQL databases that scales automatically, pauses when idle and charges by the second. It is offered in General Purpose and Hyperscale, not Business Critical, and reserved capacity does not apply.

• MONTH

  A DAX date function giving a date's month as a whole number, where 1 is January and 12 is December.

Related terms

• Assumption

  A statement the design accepts as true without evidence, for example that workloads will grow no faster than an agreed rate. Each needs an owner and a validation date, since an assumption left unchecked counts as a risk.

• Audit attributes

  Columns you can choose to add to fact or dimension tables to log the history of each row, such as the date it was inserted, the date it was last updated, or which ETL job made the change.

• Auto date/time

  With this Power BI Desktop option switched on, each date column in an Import table gets its own concealed date table, unless the column sits on a relationship's many side. That suits basic models, yet it inflates model size and prevents one shared date table from filtering several fact tables.

• Azure Governance Visualizer

  An open-source script that produces a report on a tenant's governance setup, including management groups, policy and RBAC, and highlights Azure landing zone policies that are out of date or obsolete. The Architecture Center offers an accelerator for running it.

• Balanced hierarchy

  A hierarchy in which each path has an identical, fixed depth, as with year, quarter, month, date. Ragged hierarchies and parent-child (unbalanced) ones, by contrast, have branches of differing length.

• Calendar-based time intelligence

  A preview approach to DAX date maths: after switching on Enhanced DAX Time Intelligence, you set up calendars on a table through Calendar options and pass those, rather than a date column, to time functions. Fiscal, retail and week-based calendars are all handled.

• CALENDARAUTO

  Scans the model for its first and last dates and returns a continuous Date column covering complete calendar years, or fiscal years when you pass a year-end month. As later dates arrive through refresh, this DAX function's range grows to include them.

• CBO

  The part of Spark SQL that compares possible plans, join order included, by estimating their cost from table and column statistics and picks the lowest. Poor plans often come from statistics that are absent or out of date.