Forum Discussion

giorgi_lommidd's avatar
giorgi_lommidd
Helper I
7 years ago
Solved

SSAS Date type live connection

Hello guys, I have a period dimension in SSAS but when I take it to a PBI it doesn't have a hierarchy. I did create a hierarchy in SSAS but it doesn't look the same and don't have the same functional...
Need Help
  • d_gosbell's avatar
    d_gosbell
    7 years ago

    The "automatic" date hierarchy in Power BI Desktop is made up of 2 main parts.

     

    1. Power BI builds a hidden date table with Year, Quarter, Month, Day columns and creates a hierarchy over these columns. SSAS will not automatically build this like Power BI does, but it's not hard to build this sort of table manually.

     

    2. The second thing that Power BI does with the auto-date tables is to link them to the original date column with an internal object called a Variation (this is what lets you switch between using the Date and the Hierarchy). Unforunately there is currently no way to create Variations in SSAS. This just means that you have to manually chose to use either the Hierarchy or the Date column

     

    So you loose a tiny bit of flexibility while building your report, but you should be able to build identical reports over SSAS or a Power BI model. 

     

    Unless your SSAS cube is very small I don't think I would recommend switching to import mode just to get access to the Variations functionality.

d_gosbell's avatar
d_gosbell
Super User
7 years ago

The "automatic" date hierarchy in Power BI Desktop is made up of 2 main parts.

 

1. Power BI builds a hidden date table with Year, Quarter, Month, Day columns and creates a hierarchy over these columns. SSAS will not automatically build this like Power BI does, but it's not hard to build this sort of table manually.

 

2. The second thing that Power BI does with the auto-date tables is to link them to the original date column with an internal object called a Variation (this is what lets you switch between using the Date and the Hierarchy). Unforunately there is currently no way to create Variations in SSAS. This just means that you have to manually chose to use either the Hierarchy or the Date column

 

So you loose a tiny bit of flexibility while building your report, but you should be able to build identical reports over SSAS or a Power BI model. 

 

Unless your SSAS cube is very small I don't think I would recommend switching to import mode just to get access to the Variations functionality.