There is a common need in analytics and reporting to aggregate data based on date attributes. These may include weekdays, holidays, quarters, or specific times of the year. Crunching these metrics on-the-fly can be slow and inefficient.

Calendar tables allow the complex conversions, definitions, and date-related metadata to be calculated ahead of time and stored in a static, reliable structure. We can then use this table to avoid the need to perform any date math on the fly. This not only saves time and computing resources, but also allows more complex analytics to be performed that would otherwise be very challenging. Equally important, code becomes more maintainable as date calculations are performed once in a single location, rather than repeatedly throughout an application.

This session speeds through the design, implementation, and use of calendar tables, providing demos along the way of their creation and use.