Does Analysis Services provide relative time categories?
One solution that I found (in one article) is to have a
dummy table containing only one data with the value 1 and
use it to create the Date Relative dimension.

Is there any other solution instead of using the dummy
table? One other solution that I read from an article (but
not very clear) is to have alternate hierarchy such as
Time.Normal and Time.Relative where Time.Normal can
contain all the normal time based level and Time.Relative
would contain the relative time members such as last
month, last week, etc.

I am not quite sure on how to do the second solution (as
in how to create the Time.Relative dimension). If anyone
could help, it will be much appreciated.

Thank you.

Regards,
Erica.

I'm actually examing this problem myself at the moment and don't have the
answer for you. However
i have purchaced Spofford's "MDX Solutions" and most of the debate I have
seen regarding this
issue refers to this book where there is an example of such a separate time
dimension - i have been
reading the part about this extra dimension (newbie..) but didn't get it the
first time around but i'll try
again.

Besides Spofford's book i have downloaded the BI Accelerator which have
another way of doing it where the relative time codes are in the same table
as the normal time codes - not sure if i like this or not - nice to have an
example of how to do the normal time codes but perhaps they should have been
separate dimensions.

\Michael V.

"Erica Santosaputri" <SantosaputriE (AT) rba (DOT) gov.au> wrote