The Date Dimension in Analysis Services

In data warehousing, date dimension is the most frequently used dimension. Consequently, when building a cube for a data warehouse in Analysis Services, we almost always have to create a date dimension. In this article I'd like to discuss things that we are likely to come across when creating a date dimension in Analysis Services, such as having several date dimensions and handling unknown rows. I'm going to refer to Analysis Services as SSAS, which stands for SQL Server Analysis Services. In this article I'm referring to SSAS 2005 and SSAS 2008, not SSAS 2000.