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Anonymous
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Date Table for Data that goes to hours/minutes/seconds | Robotic Process Automation

Hi all,

 

For most of my Power BI experience, I had always dealt with Date tables that only go to 'Day' level of granularity. Then of course I'll usually have Month, Quarter, Year, etc. Now, I am dealing with log event data from UiPath (RPA). For fields I have things like Status, exception, Started (example: 6/22/2021 12:19:00 AM)

 

With these type of timestamps, what should I do for a date table? I haven't run into use cases like this and can't find too much info online with folks using this. Please, if you have any insight or resoueces, send them along my way. All the best!

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
mahoneypat
Microsoft Employee
Microsoft Employee

I usually handle that scenario by splitting the DateTime column in the fact table into separate Date and Time columns (lower granularity, which will improve performance and decrease file size).  You can then create separate Date and Time tables.  You can also consider "rounding" your Time values to the nearest 5/10/15 minutes to further decrease granularity, if desired (but looks like you have minutes and not seconds, so it should be ok).

 

In your visuals, you can use both your Date and Time tables (e.g., Dates on rows and Time on columns in a matrix to make a heat map for example), and in your measures (if you need more than basic aggregations) you can iterate over your Date and/or Time columns.

 

Pat

 





Did I answer your question? Mark my post as a solution! Kudos are also appreciated!

To learn more about Power BI, follow me on Twitter or subscribe on YouTube.


@mahoneypa HoosierBI on YouTube


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1 REPLY 1
mahoneypat
Microsoft Employee
Microsoft Employee

I usually handle that scenario by splitting the DateTime column in the fact table into separate Date and Time columns (lower granularity, which will improve performance and decrease file size).  You can then create separate Date and Time tables.  You can also consider "rounding" your Time values to the nearest 5/10/15 minutes to further decrease granularity, if desired (but looks like you have minutes and not seconds, so it should be ok).

 

In your visuals, you can use both your Date and Time tables (e.g., Dates on rows and Time on columns in a matrix to make a heat map for example), and in your measures (if you need more than basic aggregations) you can iterate over your Date and/or Time columns.

 

Pat

 





Did I answer your question? Mark my post as a solution! Kudos are also appreciated!

To learn more about Power BI, follow me on Twitter or subscribe on YouTube.


@mahoneypa HoosierBI on YouTube


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