The definitive MicroStrategy blog
Ashish Tiwari
Ashish Tiwari has 5 years of experience solely working on various aspects of MicroStrategy (excluding SDK). He has experience in Financial domain and created reports having visibility of CXOs and BU heads. When not blogging or fine tuning (he is a perfectionist) this blog, he spends his time watching Hollywood flicks. Favorite movie: The Shawshank Redemption Favorite oneliner:"Statue of Liberty is Kaput!"
Homepage: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishmstr
Posts by Ashish Tiwari
Connect with MicroStrategy 101
Sep 4th
Best way to connect with bloggers on MicroStrategy 101 would be registration. Rest assured, you are assured 101% privacy. You will not get any spam from me and your information is safe. Currently there are more than 150 registered users. 
To solve your issues/share your ideas you can join the forum too. Unfortunately, currently blog and forum registration are not in sync, and you would need to register separately. I’m working on its integration.
But you can find us on lots of other social networking sites too as follows:
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Various types of Tables in MicroStrategy
Aug 29th
Most of you would be working on it w/o knowledge. Pretty nifty.
- Base table: Provides source data for metrics. In a given SQL pass, the base table(s) may be fact tables or previously calculated intermediate tables.
- Lookup table: Provides attribute IDs and descriptions. A table functions as a lookup table if its columns appear in the SELECT, WHERE or GROUP BY clauses.
- Relationship table: Includes at least two attribute ID columns to join attributes. A lookup table can serve as a relationship table, or it could serve as both a lookup and a relationship in the same query.
A table functions solely as a relationship table if it appears only in the FROM clause.
A transformation table is a special case of relationship table. - Partition mapping tables: MicroStrategy warehouse and metadata partition mapping use pre-queries to determine the physical tables to use for a particular metric. Warehouse partition mapping depends on physical tables in the warehouse, which will appear at the top of the FROM clause in the pre-query.
In Star schema, there is virtually no difference between Base Table and Lookup table.
Please let me know if there is any other type of MicroStrategy table.
GIS tools for MicroStrategy
Aug 25th
This was probably long pending, but I had first hand information only about MapInfo, now called Business Insight (such a boring name) and Visual Crossing. Among MapInfo and VisualCrossing, former is lot cheaper. My ex-employer or rather client, LoanPerformance, have used both for trail and finally settled for Visual Crossing, due to the depth of GIS information, as they wanted to show the data at MSA level not just District or pointers for city. This was obvious for a company dealing into selling best and vast history of the real estate prices in USA. If you need to show the data at a higher level, MapInfo should suffice. FYI, VisualCrossing has been co-founded by MicroStrategy alumni, who has worked in MicroStrategy SDK for a decade and its integration is extremely seamless. With these tools you need to have a GIS Server that would have geo-coding information. Integration of VS after installation takes just 5 minutes and you are good to change all geography grids to maps. AFAIK, VC supports only USA and Canada where as MI have much larger support in terms of countries.
With permission from Ehsan Hoque:
- Visual Crossing was created by Andrew Wiggemore. He also created the MicroStrategy SDK for web. So as you can imagine, his stuff has the tightest integration with the product and hence the most rapid time to deploy.
- Google/Yahoo/Microsoft integration. I have done this for a few clients including a POC with Bank of America, when I was there. While the onus of maintaining the data is on Google or others, you pay them per click or per tile depending on the pricing scheme you sign up for. Now if your website is public (which I cannot imagine it is) then you do not pay them but you are limited to 50K transactions.
- A little known solution is Oracle Spatial. If you have Oracle, then you have Oracle Spatial. The API is very much AJAX and you can replicate Google Maps like functionality. Dan Abougov (I think I spelt the name right) at Garmin (now Nokia) will sell you all the maps and spatial data you need. The advantage of this and #1 is that you do not need a round trip to an external entity.
Maps4Strategy. Until now the maps are only available for Italy, but soon we will implement Europe and USA Maps. We introduce this product on November 2009 at the National Symposium Microstrategy in Milan Italy.
If you feel interested, watch the video to understand the simplicity of use and the perfect integration whit MicroStrategy Platform.
http://www.giano-solutions.com/maps4mstr/
This arguments, brings us to the conclusion that not just the tool but the depth of GIS data sources is equally important, but this depth may or may not be concern of every client. Please share your experience of using GIS tools and source data.
Few more MicroStrategy interview question
Jul 27th
Got this from some folder, written long time ago, but forgot to post. Few questions are not complete.
- How do you verify the missing data in MSI Web? How do you verify the missing data in Teradata? Difference??
- do you know to create subscription in NCS? How will you create a dynamic subscription?
- How did you “deploy reports in Pre-prod for UAT”
- How did you upgrade to 811 from 801?
- End user want to clear cache?
- How will you disable access to a user for a particular project?
- What’s the use of Scan MD and MD Doctor?
- What are Security roles and security filter?
- How will you achieve a Transformation like Last YEAR if this information is not sored in the Warehouse?
- New Object created and moved?
- How did you tune the report as Administrator?
- What’s Heterogeneous mapping?
- why do you need to use Joint child relationship?
- How to drill to another report?
- If a Metric should disregard the filter based on common attribute?
- Why do you require hierarchy?
- What’s logical table size? How can you chnage it? How does it affect the SQL generation?
- A table has million rows and another has 200K, whihc table would be having bigger LTS?
- How did you create MEtadata and Statistics table?
- 3 different strategies to implment Security?
DB Instance
Security Filter
ACL - Any issue faced in User Merge?
- How will restrict prompt element display?
- User should be able to selection only one prompt at runtime???
Hacking MicroStrategy freeware license
Jul 14th
When MicroStrategy, Inc released free version (though limited number of users), I jumped out of my seat. I thought finally I can start learning Server SDK with free mind. The the joy was only short lived, when I installed MicroStrategy Free Reporting suite, as that MicroStrategy calls, and came to know that lots of addon tools like Command Manager, Enterprise Manager, etc are not included and SDK is not free. But the worst or plain stupid of MicroStrategy Inc was not including Object Manager in the free version. It is kind of cruel, as Organization using MicroStrategy would not be able to maintain different environment like Development, Test and Production, as Object Manager used for migrating objects between environment is not included. But it is kinda stupid of MicroStrategy too, as you need to sell a bare minimum set of component to make that work and ability to move object freely between environments is kinda cruel to client. You should think of letting freeware user to get a neck of it and they should pay (or buy) when they think that it make sense to go beyond named users/features.
Anyways, the following hack is not for getting you the features like SDK. 
, but to how use MicroStrategy Object Manager even with a freeware.
Get a copy of MicroStrategy and two serials keys, one for 30 days trial and one for 25 named user. You can use same downloaded copy to install, the serial key controls which tools would be available during installation. 30 days trial version would stop working, but this so called 30 days is for MicroStrategy Intelligence Server (heart of MicroStrategy product) and 25 named user license would never expire, but is feature limited. Now what you can do it make multiple installation of freeware MicroStrategy as DEV, TEST and PROD environment and the Object Manager installed using 30 days trial can be used for migration of objects among various environments. Kewl ins’t it. Enjoy!!!!
Cracking MicroStrategy Product Activation
I’ve been able to find flow of data exchange in License Manager and looking for someone very good in Assembler to help me finish it. I’m extremely occupied and can’t give anytime, also used Assembler more than 8 years back. I hate coding. So, if you are in Mumbai, India, just run a whois and you would know what email address you need to contact. I just want to help the companies who have MicroStrategy installed on non-windows OS and I-Server machines not exposed to internet. You know it can take half day for novice to just to activate MicroStrategy.
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