All posts by Tiwari Ashish

MicroStrategy Mobile BI /w Apple. What a self destruction


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MicroStrategy Inc

Recently three have been a lot of noise about the MicroStrategy, Inc created tools targeted to Apple users (iPod, iPad etc). More than 200 re/twits a day. Mind boggling. During recent MicroStrategy World held at Cannes, France, MicroStrategy, Inc showcased these tools with lot of fanfare. But I highly suspect MicroStrategy gaining market share or big business, just because they have Apple specific application. This is akin to an Automaker betting big one a new car launch that has only extra sun roof in the new model. give me a break dude. How many of you buy a new car just because it has a new swanky sunroof added. None. Only fools will buy that. and Betting big on Apple tools totally amazes me. Take an example of usual application world. We have something called as plug-in to applications or 3rd party tools. Over period of time, some plug-ins become must have for end users. In fact, some time application maker itself become a competitor to plug-in/3rd party tool maker. Apple Tools are not really exciting for sane business people, at least they should not be. It is strange that MicroStrategy is doing very little to publicize the integrated support to Blackberry, which exist for more than 3 years. What a pity.

Something, that’s really extremely good is MicroStrategy, Inc hypnotizing the people who are decision maker for purchase. Unfortunately no Technical person accompany them during these Tech (read, Trade) show. Take an example of my current client, one of Fortune 100 company. The Stake holders are people who seems to have little knowledge about what’s being built using MicroStrategy in their respective team. The presentation shown by MicroStrategy Sales team make everything like piece of cake, dynamic dashboard looks like child play. But unfortunately reality is not so close to that. First of all, minuscule %age of Report Requester and/or End Users really use the premium feature of MicroStrategy. Dynamic dashboard is not easy stuff. This is not really related to Apple Tools, but for the business users of MicroStrategy products.

Now cut back to Apple Tools, which are nothing but a Marketing tool. Hold you breathe, One can not see the flashy dynamic dashboard reports on any Apple appliance as Steve Jobs thinks Adobe Flash, platform on which MicroStrategy Dynamic dashboard run in MicroStrategy Web, are the biggest reason of Apple iPods/iPads crashing and doesn’t have Adobe Flash.

I don’t know if Blackberry was failure, but betting on Apple which has very small penetration among Business users is a stupid idea. You can get the eye ball but sales and I pity anyone buying MicroStrategy for its Mobile Application. This is not an innovative idea like Twitter/Facebook that change the landscape for everyone. FB/Twitter were unique and they created a market for themselves, Saylor saying that Mobile BI would be a game changer for MicroStrategy, is a very bad calculation. You have been industry leader for rest of you in BI landscape, but Mobile BI.. Game changer.. ha ha ha ha…

Extracting Long Description using Command Manager


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MicroStrategy

About two weeks ago!

Received an SOS email from Kiran asking the method to extract the Long Description of Metrics using Command Manager. Not worked on CM much other than some bulk generation of attributes/facts, in past. Search on knowledge base and found the cause. There are predefined CM scripts that would let us do 80% of things that Command Manager can do, but rest 20% (the real gem) is not made available through scripts, but the documentation is available. Make sense as CM is not a widely used tool (though it is very powerful) and its uses are very limited.

Anyways, the script to populate Long Description would be as follows:

GET PROPERTIES (property1, property2, … , propertyN) FROM METRIC “<object_name>” IN FOLDER “<location_path>” FOR PROJECT “<project_name>”

Property Number List

  1. NAME
  2. ID
  3. DESCRIPTION
  4. LOCATION
  5. CREATIONTIME
  6. MODIFICATIONTIME
  7. OWNER
  8. LONGDESCRIPTION
  9. HIDDEN

I couldn’t check the following when I worked on MicroStrategy 9 but as per my friend, Command Manager is integrated with MicroStrategy Web. OR let me put other way, it is very easy to generate the CM manager scripts using MicroStrategy Web SDK, otherwise people would have had to generate/code the Meta data code/SQL. This will make a lot of work related to SDK a lot easy to be integrated into Web as we can make a CM scripts to be executed instead of writing a lenghty code to be executed. Stay tuned, I’m expecting this integration somewhere in Sept and will post about it then.

MicroStrategy is coming to India (May be)


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MicroStrategy Inc

Finally … finally.. it looks like that MicroStrategy, Inc would be setting up the offshore development center or at least some support office. I say looks like because MicroStrategy, Inc is run by a single man’s fanatics (or lunacy), that single man is CEO, who has finally realized the importance of setting up a shop in India (This guy still can have a change of mind). It is some what sad that MicroStrategy, Inc is last BI product maker setting up office in India (sad not because I’m an India, but their god that intelligence about the price advantage.) IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Google, Cognos, SAP.. you name it and they not only have call center, offshore development center but R&D division in India too.

MicroStrategy as a product has no future in India. Not because Indian don’t understand TCO but the Indian mentality that I must get to see (something physical or quick results) when I’m spending such a big money. Just to explain, I have few businessmen friends, who say “What the hell you work in Software? I don’t see it. I make building …… (add anything into construction).. worth tens of millions and people can see it.. what do you guys do. why should I spend so much money for something that I can’t see” This is not an isolated case but a great reflection of Indian mindset. I know of few shops who do business of INR 1 million a day and spend 3 hours (9 pm to midnight) just in (manual) accounting. They just hate computers. Tax evasion is also a reason, through records can be shred in computers too.

MicroStrategy most probably would be having office at Pune and may pull the team working on MicroStrategy QA and documentation at Cybage. The team there must be ~ 35. I don’t have any contact for last 2 years, but a guess. Few work is done by another company, I do not wish to name.

But I’m really thinking what the domain name they would be having. :)

Deleting unused Facts in MicroStrategy


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Administration, Architect

I was searching a technote for a friend about distinct not apearing in the SQL (not something to do True Key, sadly) with the and landed up with this interesting technote which I’m going to implment for my current project sometime. We can’t use Object Manager to find this even though there is specific feature to do it as Tables are considered (logically) dependent on Facts. [Can anyone from MicroStrategy explain why is that? It should be other way round.]

Luckily it is simple but you need to have Select access on Metadata. Just run following query against your metadata database and your would get the list of afacts not used by any metric. Also, your would need to run it for each project your have. :(

SELECT object_id,
       object_name
FROM   dssmdobjinfo
WHERE  object_type = 13
       AND project_id = <Project ID> 
       AND object_id NOT IN (SELECT DISTINCT depn_objid AS object_id
                             FROM   dssmdobjdepn
                             WHERE  project_id =??
                                    AND depnobj_type = 13
                                    AND object_type = 4)
ORDER  BY object_id ASC

Disclaimer: Running a unmanaged SQL query against Metadata is not guranteed by MicroStrategy, Inc.

Using URL SDK to drill or hyperlink in Document


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Development, SDK

This is one of the requirement that I had sized quite some time back, and luckily I got go-ahead to implement it. My current client has process under which each projects goes, need less to say, time consuming. When business user say that they want drilling to be standardized, I feel a bit awkward. Most of the business users from my current clients have been trained by MicroStrategy, Inc. itself. 😐 First, these guys must know the difference between drilling and hyperlinking. Drilling is a feature of MicroStrategy, which comes OOB where as hyperlinking is something done by MicroStrategy developer, by actual link option for text fields (Similar to VB that we have been seeing for long) or using attributes having form of type html.

Now here is the requirement. Ex-vendor ripped the client big time by doing clumsy work. Thanks to them. :) They had created some enterprise dashboards that were having serialized hyperlinking. These hyperlinking were dependent on the name of project as well as the I-Server IP address. They just changed the name of MicroStrategy project and every URL went for toss. Now imagine, IP address/machine name of I-Server machine changing. This exercise would be repeated. I ran through 7-8 months old email regarding the same and found some leads, but were not working. Don’t know why, I myself had provided the solution to my peer. There are no (single) tech notes that would help me finding a solution, but I could find a solution by combining 2 tech notes, so relaxed.

Here is problem: Currently client has url SDK implemented as

http://abc.xyz.com/WebServer/servlet/mstrWeb?Project=<Project_Name>&Server=<IServer>&port=0&evt=4001&src=mstrWeb.report.4001&reportID=<Report_ID>&reportViewMode=1&src=mstrWeb

I can’t give exact example due to confidentiality but example above is very similar to actual, except that real one is about executing a document where as above one is about a report. Now, client want to remove the dependent on IP Address (We are providing removing the dependence as extra free addon, or may be we should generate more profit in future as that standardization is not part of the current scope of work) :D. Current URL is more complex and has two more not required events and corresponding arguments.

Now if tomorrow, any change of IP/machine name would make the work useless. The solution is simple. Simply remove the reference to them. The real magic of URL SDK lies in event and argument. You can read the function PDF that comes with installation of MicroStrategy. It talks about 4-5 event. A glimpse: You can create a link that will execute the report with particular attributes in page-by axis or Run reports/document with prompt answers.

In case of jumping from one prompted document to another, you need to pass messageID parameter that would forward the prompt to next document.

Only drawback of using URL SDK: Not a drawback, I would not recommend doing it. Using URL SDK you can also pass the login/apssword and create a hyperlinks that would work from a complete non-MicroStrategy page. Remember, I’m talking about the hyperlink not the resultant of hyperlinking. This puts your system in some disadvantageous situation.