MDX calculated measures with date comparisons - date

I'm new of MDX and I'm trying to calculate a new measure based on two different date dimensions.
I have the Creation Date Dimension (with Year, Trimester, Month, Day) and Resolution Date (with Year, Trimester, Month, Day).As measure I have the number of tickets and I want to calculate two new measures in order to know how many tickets that were resolved this month were actually created last month and how many tickets were resolved in the same month as they were created.
I found this interesting post, but I cannot understand how to use properties..
https://bennyaustin.com/2012/06/05/ssas-mdx-calculated-measures-that-require-date-comparison/
Any ideas or suggests?
Thanks for your help.

This question cannot be answered as asked without knowing the exact definition of your time dimensions.
An approach which might be worth considering if your MDX knowledge is little, but you have some SQL knowledge and if your requirements can be fixed to just the month level as you described, could be the following, which does the main calculations already when loading the cube, and not at query time in MDX:
Add a column 'months_from_creation_to_resolution' to your fact table, possibly just add this as a column in the view you may already use on the fact table. This column would be 0 if the ticket was resolved in the same month where it was created, 1 if it was resolved in the month after creation, 2 if it was resolved e. g. in May and created in March, etc. You do this calculation using SQL date functions. You would then create a new dimension in your cube from this table, which would have the new column as the only attribute. SSAS has no problem using a table as base for both a measure group and a dimension.
Then, in MDX, the number of tickets resolved in the month they were created would just be
([Measures].[TicketCount], [Fact].[months from creation to resolution].[0])
and those resolved in the month after creation would be
([Measures].[TicketCount], [Fact].[months from creation to resolution].[1])
As a side effect, the query run time would be faster, as the main logic is pre-calculated when loading the cube.

Related

How do we calculate difference and percent difference between two columns in tableau

]Difference and percent Difference must be calculated.
I cannot do Apr20-MAy20 because it is not always the same. I need to show the current month and previous month
So I did a relative filter to just show the current month and previous month.
So the difference of two columns should automatically change when the month changes.
Now how do I get the same month of prior year, how do I filter ?
I also need to calculate the difference of current year same month and previous year same month.
Thank you in advance for any help!
When I do table across difference, the difference value is overwriting the existing May and Apr month values as the below screen shot, how to show the difference in another column
Currently:
Below is Expected:
Sounds like you should create a custom filter for the dates. You want:
This month this year
This month last year
Last month this year
There are a number of ways you could do this. I'll give one example and will assume there aren't any future dates in your data set.
[DateFilter]: DATETRUNC('month',[YourDateField])>=DATETRUNC('month',DATEADD('month',-1,TODAY())) OR DATETRUNC('month',[YourDateField])=DATETRUNC('month',DATEADD('year',-1,TODAY()))
Put the to the filters shelf, set to True, and it should keep the months you want.
Then you can just use the standard table calculations to calculate Difference and Percent Difference.
Note, the formula isn't tested, just typed directly into here, let me know if it doesn't work
Based on your comments look at creating separate calculations for to YoY / MoM / etc calculation. That also means creating calculated fields to isolate the Current Month, Previous Month, etc.
For example, the current month:
[isCM]: DATETRUNC('month',[YourDateField]) = DATETRUNC('month',TODAY())
The previous month:
[isPM]: DATETRUNC('month',[YourDateField]) = DATETRUNC('month',DATEADD('month',-1,TODAY()))
Then month on month, something like:
[MoM]: (SUM([Measure])*INT([isCM]))/(SUM([Measure])*INT([isPM]))
To make your table check this article about using the placeholder technique to create tables in Tableau

Crystal Reports - create calendar

I need to create an attendence list showing days in rows and employee names in colums. The list will always cover one full month chosen in parameters.
How can I create a recordset of days of chosen month? I've done it in command section but, due to ERP system limitations, it must done otherways.
Thank you,
Przemek
A good approach is to create a Calendar table (aka Date Dimension in data warehousing lingo). It makes it easy to show days without any attendance. If you don't need that aspect, you can simply create a formula that returns the attendance date month's day, and Group on that formula. The Day() function gets you the day of month. For example,
Day ({Orders.Order Date})
If you search 'creating a data dimension or calendar table' you'll find many helpful sources such as this one: https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/4054/creating-a-date-dimension-or-calendar-table-in-sql-server/
For your case, I agree with the comments in that post about using date instead of integer as the primary key. Integer PK makes more sense for true data warehousing scenarios as opposed to legacy databases.

Loading date or datetime into date dimension

Let's say I have a date dimension and from my business requirements I know that the most granular I would need to go is to examine the specific day of the month that an event occurred.
The data I am given provides me with the exact time that an event occurred (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS). I have two opitons:
Before loading the data into the date dimension, slice the HH:MM:SS from the date.
Create the time attributes in my date dimension and insert the full date time.
The way I see it, I should go with the option 1. This would remove redundant data and save some space. However, if I go with option 2, should the business requirements ever change or if my manager suddenly wants to be more granular I wouldn't need to modify my original design. Which option is more commonly used? Are there more options that I did not consider?
Update - follow up question
I receive new data every month. If I used a pre built date dimension with all the dates would I then need to run my script every month to populate the table with new dates of that month or would I have a continuous process where by every day insert into the table one row, which would be that date?
I would agree with you and avoid option 2. A standard date dimension table is at the individual date level. If you did need to analyse by time of day, you could create an additional time of day dimension at the level of a second in a single day, and link to that from your fact table.
Your date dimension should be created by script automatically, rather than from the dates that events occurred. This allows you to analyse across a range of events from other facts, and on dates where no events occur, using a standard, prebuilt dimension.
I would also include the full date/time stamp as a column in the fact table, along with the 'DateKey' to the dimension table. This would allow you some visibility/analysis of the timestamp, you would not lose the data, and would still allow you to analyse by the date dimension.
Update - follow up question
Your pre-built date dimension (the standard way of doing it) would usually contain some dates in the future. There's no reason not to, for example, include another 5 years of dates in the table. But if you'd like it to gradually grow over time, you could have a script that is run once a day, once a month, or once a year to add new dates. Its totally up to you! There are many example scripts for building date dimensions- just google date dimension script. They exist for the language of your choice, e.g. SQL, C#, Power Query, etc.

Storing dates as nodes in Neo4j

I'm new to Neo4j so maybe I'm just completely wrong on this, but I'll give it a try!
Our data is mostly composed by reservations, users and facilities stored as nodes.
I need both to count the total reservations that occurred in a specific time frame and the overall income (stored as reservation.income) in this timeframe.
I was thinking to overcome the problem by creating the date as a node, in this way I can assign a relationship [:PURCHASED_ON] to all the reservations that occurred on a specific date.
As far as I've understood, creating the date as a node could give me a few pros:
I could split the date from dd/mm/yyyy and store them as integer properties, in this way I could use mathematical operators such as > and <
I could create a label for the node representing each month as a word
It should be easier to sum() the income on a day or a month
Basicly, I was thinking about doing something like this
CREATE (d:Day {name:01/11/2016 day: TOINT(01), month: TOINT(11), year: TOINT(2016)}
I have seen that a possible solution could be to create a node for every year, every month (1-12) and every day (1-31), but I think that would just complicate terribly the architecture of my Graph since every reservation has an "insert_date" (the day it's created) and then the official "reservation_date" (the day it's due).
Am I onto something here or is it just a waste of time? Thanks!
You may want to look at the GraphAware TimeTree library, as date handling is a complex thing, and this seems to be the logical conclusion of the direction you're going. The TimeTree also has support for finding events attached to your time tree between date ranges, at which point you can perform further operations (counting, summing of income, etc).
There are many date/time functions in the APOC plugin that you should take a look at.
As an example, you can use apoc.date.fields (incorrectly called by the obsolete name apoc.date.fieldsFormatted in the APOC doc) to get the year, month, day to put in your node:
WITH '01/11/2016' AS d
WITH apoc.date.fields(d, 'MM/dd/yyyy') AS f
CREATE (d:Day {name: d, day: f.days, month: f.month, year: f.years});
NOTE: The properties in the returned map have names that are oddly plural. I have submitted an issue requesting that the names be made singluar.

Creating Bins in Tableau for Days in a Week

Could someone please explain me creating BINS based on Weekdays in Tableau? I tried creating different Calculation Fields but it won't work
You're working too hard.
Tableau already knows how to bin values by dates at many levels of granualarity: such as year, month, day, weekday, hour etc. So you don't need to create a new field to bin dates by the day of the week. (creating bins is not difficult, it's just already available in this case)
Just put a discrete (blue) date or datetime field on a shelf. You'll see the date level of granularity displayed like, say, YEAR(MyDateField) with a leading plus sign.
You can either
click on the plus sign to drill down by adding a second level, say MONTH(MyDateField)
or
right click on the field to select the date level of granularity you want
Alex's Answer is exactly correct, Tableau will perform the operation automatically. What is great about is that you can select various formats (Full day name, number, 1 letter or 3 letter day etc.).
However if you absolutely need to you can used this formula:
datepart('weekday',[Date])
to give you the 1 (Sunday) to 7 (Saturday) value if you need it for something other reason, say another calculation.