File Under SSAS Demo Creation

In the course of creating a demo for a potential client, my team made the following observation. While the time dimension is always crucial to a BI solution, for a laptop portable demo stay away from models that incorporate two (or more) time dimensions. For example, in Hospitality refrain from using a model with Check-In and Check-Out dates, instead consider using Check-In Date (or Check-Out Date) and a measure indicating the interval, for example Nights. This helps avoid a sparse cube with few aggregatable date pair combinations.

Obviously, in a production environment the client may have valid reasons to employ both a Check-In and Check-Out date dimension role. However, production hardware deployment won't have the constraints of an all-up demo environment executing SQL Server, SharePoint and PerformancePoint an a single (laptop) machine.