Creating a date dimension in dbt and Snowflake

A lot of the data that I am working with doesn't lend itself to creating complex star schemas (more on data modelling in a later post) however I want to try and at least want to go to some effort. The one thing that pretty much all my tables have in common is date, so I want to build a date dimension. My strength training happens on a day, my running and walking, parkrun and hopefully the weather data I intend to integrate will have a date on it. This means if I have a date dimension and I aggregate my various facts at date level I can use them together in a single visualisation.

There are various methods I could have used to create the date dimension and I went with using the dbt spine, this was really simple using the utilities:

Used the date functions in Snowflake to extract relevant fields such as year, month, day in words and year month etc.

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