Build a role-playing date dimension for order, ship, and delivery

My orders table has three date columns and every report I write has to guess which one the user means.

Beginner to intermediateRead 6 minDoing: an afternoon6 steps

▶ Start

What you'll have at the end

Three date views, order date, ship date, delivery date, all reading from one shared calendar table

Before you start

You need

A table of order records with three separate date columns (something like order date, ship date, delivery date) already loaded somewhere you can run SQL against.

Not covered

This does not cover getting the order data into that table in the first place, or handling a date role added after the fact (a return date tacked on weeks later); those are ETL and schema-change problems of their own.

Leans on

6 steps

Where to go next

Build an accumulating snapshot to time an order's fulfillment stages

If you need to track and update several fulfillment milestones on one changing row over time, an accumulating snapshot table fits that job better than three date views.

Checked 25 Aug 2026

Part of the Kimball Data Modeling cookbook