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cerebraino's avatar
cerebraino
Microsoft Employee
3 years ago
Solved

Safely Removing Auto date time created tables

Hello, we have a main dataset serving around 100 reports, regretfully the creators of that dataset initially had "autodate time" setting turned on , which as you knows creates automatically for each date column found in the model a "ghost/hidden date table".
Recently the dataset has been getting larger and awfully slow, and we suspect one part of the problem are such hidden legacy date tables therefore we want to remove them but are weary of breaking some old reports using them.
y question is how we can rapidly/easily identify if a given report is using such tables so we can assign work to fix it.
In other words what are the visible signs one report is using the automatic date time function?

Also my other question is once we fix reports, how can we remove such tables? just by turning off auto date time? using dax studio or tabular editor?
Thanks in advance!!!

  • Hi, cerebraino ;

    As far as I know, there is currently no way to automatically remove safely
    Date table;
    A convenient way to do this is to save a copy and then delete the date table to see if the original report was affected? If there is no impact, you can delete the table directly;
    For how to easily identify whether the report is using this table, you can click on each visual and it will display the table corresponding to the field.


    Best Regards,
    Community Support Team _ Yalan Wu
    If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

6 Replies

    • cerebraino's avatar
      cerebraino
      Microsoft Employee

      Actually that video inspired me to find proper ways to remove the automatically created date time tables which in my case are numerous and heavy, the problem is if I go ahead and just change the setting many reports, difficult to know which, out of the 100 will suddenly break annoying many users, therefore I would like to be able to easily know in advance, which reports would break, thanks for your reply!

      • Brunner_BI's avatar
        Brunner_BI
        Impactful Individual

        we added a capability to Measure Killer to detect where you are using hierarchies/fields from Auto Date/time tables recently (version 2.7 and later).

  • v-yalanwu-msft's avatar
    v-yalanwu-msft
    Community Support

    Hi, cerebraino ;

    As far as I know, there is currently no way to automatically remove safely
    Date table;
    A convenient way to do this is to save a copy and then delete the date table to see if the original report was affected? If there is no impact, you can delete the table directly;
    For how to easily identify whether the report is using this table, you can click on each visual and it will display the table corresponding to the field.


    Best Regards,
    Community Support Team _ Yalan Wu
    If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

  • cerebraino's avatar
    cerebraino
    Microsoft Employee

    Hello I have a follow up / additional question about this, via DAX Studio I have generated a list of all maasures of my model, and out of such I have found all which usde the autodate time tables, my question is can I just remove the .[date] part of such or which considerations should I have in order for the measures to keep working, here's and example

     

    CALCULATE(
    MIN(factManualOKRandKPIData[Value])+0,
    FILTER(factManualOKRandKPIData,
    factManualOKRandKPIData[KPIName]="InDiscoveryCapacityLimits"
    && factManualOKRandKPIData[DatathroughDate].[Date]= DATE(YEAR(TODAY()), MONTH(TODAY()), 1)
    )
    )

     

    Can I just delete the .[date] portion? after turning off the auto datetime setting?

     

    Thanks

     

    Juan