Friday, September 5, 2014

Using Tableau with SQL Server Analysis Services (Date dimensions in particular)

If you point Tableau at SSAS multidimensional cubes, you will want to be able to use relative date filtering. Here’s the easiest way:


You will filter on dimension attributes whose values are of this form: YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY-MM, and YYYY. The properties of the YYYY-MM look like this:

ssas properties


If you put those attributes in a hierarchy, do not hide them, as SSAS suggests (with a blue squiggly that has a tooltip that says “Avoid visible attribute hierarchies for attributes used as levels in user-defined hierarchies”). When you’re in Tableau, you need to tell Tableau to treat these 3 attributes as dates, and you cannot do that to attributes that are *only* in a hierarchy.


Once your cube has processed, go in to Tableau and connect to it. You will see this by default:

data type default


You want to change it to this:

treat as date


After that, relative date filtering seems to work fine.


This blog post mentioned something about having to change how unique values are determined by Tableau: http://ift.tt/1pyOuoo


I didn’t have to though. This is what seems to be working, and it’s the default that Tableau decided on:

unique values by key





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