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SerSwagster
Creator
Creator

Should I use Master Calendar or not?

Hi everyone,

I have I a complex data model with 16 tables, most of which containing multiple and different date dimensions (date and timestamps), and full of data (several millions of records). I want to make the model as slim as possible, reducing redundancies and useless weighting. My question is: should I use master calendar for this purpose? Because, as I understand it, when using Master Calendar, I have to create a new table for each different time dimension, two in case of timestamps; in my particular case, I should add at least 15 new tables, and I think this is not the right way to lighten the data model. Is my reasoning right?

1 Reply
Or
MVP
MVP

The answer to your question depends on what you actually need to achieve with your app. Typically, the fact that you have a date / timestamp in your data doesn't always mean users will want to filter or view that date/timestamp based on all of its calendar fields, meaning you should only set up calendar fields for the ones where it is required for filtering or display purposes. You can always add more later if you missed something.That said, your app may have different requirements and there's no one obvious answer except to do what works for your requirements.

Note that working with timestamps is actually not a great idea if you want a slim app, so if at all possible, you'll want to either get rid of the time component or split them into a date field and a time field rather than keep the full timestamp (and round the timestamp off to the nearest minute or second if at all possible). This is because each unique value in a field needs to be stored individually, and timestamps tend to be unique for each row which could generate millions of unique values across a data set. Meanwhile, dates are typically limited to a few thousand unique values  and times are limited to 1440 or 86400 unique values (depending on whether you round to minutes or seconds), resulting in a slimmer app.