All posts by Tiwari Ashish

MicroStrategy 101 on Facebook

MicroStrategy 101 has been a started by me for broadcasting the posts on the blog and actively providing small help on facebook itself. All the blogpost links are posted on facebook page too. Post freely. You don’t require a facebook account for this. Senthil is actively managing this facebook page.

 

Please share you wacky MicroStrategy idea here of on facebook. Keep coming for great MicroStrategy stuff.

MicroStrategy Report is taking too much time to execute

Troubleshooting steps
1. Check the report SQL generated in different environments (PROD, UAT and DEV). Match the SQL generated. Technically they *must* match. If they are NOT matching, you need to correct your attribute definition and/or parent-child relationship. FYI, Tedatada is not so forgiving for mismatched column types in database and as declared in attribute form definition.
2. Check the Load on database server. It may be offline, too much loaded with requests.
3. Job priority in the Server can 32432432a report in queue for long/infinite. Check MicroStrategy System Monitor under Project Source Administration.
4. Verify that you SQL is being run against the correct database. Check the Project DB Instance.
5. Your schema object definition is up to date. Try updating Schema.
6. Non MicroStrategy cause: Some Web Server load balancer can made to time out a query/request if not resolved under a stupulated time. Check Load Balance team.

SharePoint Integration with MicroStrategy

Recently, while working on one of my project assignments I got to work on the integration of SharePoint 2010 with MicroStrategy 9. The requirement was to pull the report from the MicroStrategy and show that in a web part. We had the MicroStrategy environment set up and also I had my SharePoint development environment set up.Here, I will show you how you can configure the SharePoint environment to pull reports from the MicroStrategy. When you contact MicroStrategy for their portlets, which can be plugged with SharePoint, you will get a .CAB file. This CAB file has two web parts in it 1) ‘MicroStrategy Master Web Part’ 2) ‘MicroStrategy Web Part’. This also has MSTRWebParts.dll which, you can use to create a custom web part to display data from MicroStrategy(I will talk about this in other post), and a few .js files. You might be thinking “Enough of talking, Take me to the procedures of configuration”. So here you go:
Step 1: Install the CAB file: Log in to the server machine as an Administrator. To install the CAB file you can use following commands:stsadm.exe -o addwppack -filename “$your_location_of_cab_file$\MSTRWebParts.CAB”. 

Step 2: Configuring security for the MicroStrategy Web Part:
To configure the security either you can elevate the permission level to ‘Full Trust’ in the web.config file, which is neither a good practice nor secure, or you can use Trust level as WSS_minimal” and modify the appropriate policy configuration file which is located at “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Config\wss_minimaltrust.config” and make an entry for MSTRWebParts.dll in the <CodeGroup> section. You can read more about it over the net. There are many good articles explaining “Custom CAS policy for SharePoint”. You can also follow this Microsoft documentation.

Step 3: Enabling HTTP Session State in SharePoint

The MicroStrategy Web Part for the SharePoint Portal requires the HTTP Session State to be enabled. However, by default, HTTP Session State is disabled by the SharePoint Portal Server. To enable the HTTP Session State in SharePoint Portal 2010, you must modify the web.config file for SharePoint (located by default under C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\ and SharePoint Admin (located by default under C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\.

Note: It is a good practice to make a backup of important configuration files, such as the web.config file, before making changes.

To enable HTTP Session State, use any text editor to make the following changes to the web.config files in the locations described above:

  1. Enable the SessionStateModule:
Add the node shown in bold below as a child node for the node:Before:<httpModules/>

After:

<httpModules>

<add name=”Session” />

</httpModules>

    1. Enable the SessionState:

Find the node beneath . Set the enableSessionState attribute to “true”.

  1. Add the session state module to the IIS (Internet Information Services) 7 managed pipeline for MicroStrategy Web.
    1. Open IIS 7 Manager and find SharePoint.
    2. Double-click Modules in the IIS section.
    3. Click Add Managed Module … in the right-hand pane.
    4. On the Add Managed Module dialog, enter a name such as “SessionState” and choose System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule from the dropdown.
  2. Restart IIS for the changes to take effect.

Step 4: Creating User Profiles for MicroStrategy Credentials and Locals:

To set user credentials and locales for a MicroStrategy Web Part, you must add the necessary user profile properties on the SharePoint Portal Server. To set these properties, do the following:

  1. Open SharePoint Central Administration, click Manage Service Applications under Applications and then click on User Profile Service Application. On the page that opens, click on Manage User Properties under People and then click on New Property
  2. In the Property Settings textboxes, add the properties listed below, using the values provided or indicated. If you want to give users the ability to change credentials or set locales, choose “Allow users to edit values for this property” in the Edit Settings options.
    Property
    Settings
    Name
    DataLocale
    DisplayLocale
    MSTR-UID
    MSTR-PWD
    MetadataLocale
    Display name
    Data Locale
    Display Locale
    MicroStrategy User
    MicroStrategy
    Password
    Metadata Locale
    Type
    integer
    integer
    string
    string
    string
    integer
    Sub-type of Profile
    Make sure that the checkbox for “Default User Profile Sub-type” is checked
    Policy Settings
    Select “Optional”, rather than “Required” (which is the default selection)
    Edit Settings
    Select “Allow users to edit values for this property”

    When you make these property settings, you must use the exact property names and types shown in the table above, but you can use different display names if you want.

    You can choose whether or not to let user see or edit these settings. To give users the ability to change credentials or set locales in a MicroStrategy Web Part, you must add the necessary user profile properties on the SharePoint Portal Server.

    If you don’t want Web Part users to be able to change the data locale or display locale, the DisplayLocale and DataLocale profile properties are optional. In this case, the SharePoint Portal user’s language setting will be used for these two locales. If you use only Windows Authentication or Guest Authentication, the MSTR-UID and MSTR-PWD profile properties are also optional.

    If you don’t want to allow Web Part users to change the values for any of their user profile properties (DataLocale, DisplayLocale, MSTR-UID, or MSTR-PWD) on the edit pane, you should not change Edit Settings to “Allow Users to edit values for this property”. When this setting is not made, only portal server administrators can assign and change the values for these profile properties in the Shared Services Administration page.

That’s it. You are good to go now. Go to the page>Edit Page and add “MicroStrategy Web Part” to it and configure all its values. If you have proper permissions to your MicroStrategy environment then you should be able to see the report that you have configured in the web part settings.

 

[This blog may not be relevant]

Conditional alerts in MicroStrategy…. that to not using Narrowcast Server

Last week, one of our clients had hugh increase in the sales numbers. Everyone in the BI team gets reports regarding data; data load status, etc as soon as it is over. Local team was a bit amused and prima facia client ath “finally Christmas sale has picked up”. Wow.. but when ETL team looked closely, we came to know that was issue with data provided by mainframe team. Scheduler uploaded two copies of the files in the folder under which all files are loaded blindly into data warehouse. Rarely faced any issue like double file.

 

I asked my colleague, who is a Narrowcast champ, why can’t we have few schedules/alters for data load errors. He told me that they were already having several emails regarding data load status. Personally, it is a bad idea to receive data load status report on daily basis, as chance of an error is next to nil and you may forget to read automated status report. (Though he manages the status religiously and had instantly pointed out to ETL team regarding this issue that day, I was looking for conditional alerts. My friend told me that conditional alerts are only possible using FF SQL reports, also we need to use Windows scheduler to activate the alerts and need to compare if we require it to send only if some condition is met. Pretty messy and lengthy in Narrowcast server.

 

Finally, I found a very easy solution using Web subscriptions. Well….. it is possible to create an email subscription which will be executed when a certain conditional is satisfied. To create a conditional email subscription, use following steps.

1. Create reports with base metric and at least one threshold metric.

2. Execute the report.

3. From Right mouse click menu on any metric, select Alerts.

4. Alert editor (Similar to filter editor) opens up. You can specify the criteria.

5. Under Delivery settings, specify Schedule, email address, delivery format and any custom message.

6. Bonus: If you want another report to be sent if this condition is satisfied, you can specify the report name using “Send different report or document”.

MicroStrategy India is so lame

I know that MicroStrategy, Inc is very much pissed off by me not handing over the .IN and .CO.IN domains, but they have been very nice confirming the registration for events held. I really liked it. But looks like recent bash of speaker of event held on did not go too well with them. I had applied for MicroStrategy event on Mobile BI (to be held on 11th Nov on) and Enterprise BI (to be held on 9th Dec) on 14th Oct. While event to be held on Mobile BI was postponed and eventually cancelled, I was expecting that I would get confirmed invite for Mobile BI event in Nov. Events get cancelled due to not getting good industry speakers or good number of presence by decision maker (who decides on BI purchases). I was shocked when I received a application denial for Mobile BI. Receiving a reminder about denial was even bigger shock. Well, I though MicroStrategy must have been able to merge the vents and find good number of guys, so application rejection was some what acceptable. But, I felt something was a miss when even this event was postponed by a week. Did they fail to get speaker for such an event even after 3 months. Highly unlikely! but event seat not filled, possible. Still I was denied entry for this event.

But I was hoping that I would get the invite for Enterprise BI event for sure. After all I had applied almost 2 months in advance. But my joy was short lived when I received another email on 24th Nov itself regarding event being oversubscrbed and not able to accommodate me.I just checked with my friends with ex-employer regarding going for this events. They were simply unaware about this event. I didn’t inform my friends regarding them about so called over subscription. To my biggest surprise, they got (total 5 person) got confirmed invites for Enterprise BI event, even after having applied after me getting an over subscription notice. I some how doubt that this event was really postponed. Their (friend working in ex-employer) only fault was that they knew me.

I really don’t know why are they acting like a puss. Not to forget they just revoked access to MicroStrategy download site for my official id and blog id on the pretext of “not having a support agreement in place”. Really don’t know how far they will go.