The challenge I will address in this article is the following: I would like to provide a nice presentation of data aggregated by time period. For example: an overview of the number of employees that was hired in each year in each department (example is drawn from table EMP). The presentation could look like this:

To extend the challenge a little bit: I would like to be able to drill down. From the year level shown in this picture, to the Quarter level and even to the Month level. The Quarter level would look similar – but more fine grained:

This article shows how this challenge can be addressed using ADF DVT – Data Visualization components, more specially the Resource Utilization Gantt Chart. It will describe how ADF BC is used in conjunction with the SQL TRUNC function and a smart bind parameter to allow for dynamic zooming to different time aggregation levels. And the approach demonstrated in this article can easily be reused for other time based presentations.

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