Many of our products utilize a date table (dimension in warehousing speak). They make quite a few things easier when you are doing reporting over denormalized data.

For example you no longer have to write case statements in every report to return back whether the particular day was a weekday of weekend, or wrap the date in a function in every query to return day of the week, etc.

There are many uses and if you find that you are having to wrap a date in any function call or case statement for a report you may want to consider just adding that field to the date table to simplify future reports.

Thomas LeBlanc wrote a post that summarizes some of the other reasons you may want to use a Date dimension table.

How has the data dimension helped you? Do you have nightmares about dates coming through a portal in space?

Let us know in the comments below.