Category Archives: Engine

Intelligent Cube – Part-1

Architect, Engine, I-Server, MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy 9

Intelligent Cubes: An Intelligent Cube is a set of data that can be shared as a single in-memory copy, among many different reports created by multiple users. Rather than returning data from the data warehouse for a single report,
you can return sets of data from your data warehouse and save them directly to Intelligence Server memory. The reports accessing Intelligent Cubes can use all of the OLAP Services features for analysis and reporting purposes.

Intelligent Cubes are created and published for use as a shared data source for the users to build reports from. Intelligent Cubes provide the fast response time and analytic calculations that are often associated with Multidimensional Online Analytic Processing (MOLAP) cubes, while also benefiting from the ability to use Relational Online Analytic Processing (ROLAP) by drilling into the full set of data outside of the Intelligent Cube. In addition, Intelligent Cubes are fully scalable, limiting excessive data consumption and redundant data by allowing you to build only the sets of data you require.
An intelligent cube is made up of two files – an info file (contains the structure of the cube) and a data file. Each one of them has a representation in memory and indicates different things:

  1. When the data file is not  updated with its representation from memory, the cube’s “dirty status flag”  is set to true.
  2. When the info file is different from its representation in memory, then the cube’s “monitoring information dirty status flag” is set to true.

While (1) indicates that the data of the cube is incorrect (2) indicates that the cube’s monitoring information is different on disk than it is in memory.

The following section discusses an example of the workflow and status change for MicroStrategy 9.x Intelligent Cube:
P = Processing, A = Active,  L = Loaded, D = Dirty, F = Filed, M = Monitoring Information Dirty

Coming soon on dynamic cube usage

Trick to sort on attributes inside Object Prompt

Engine, Prompt,

This is an old trick concerning sorting in reports and templates.
Let’s say your report uses an object prompt containing a number of attributes and you want the results to be ordered by those attributes. If you simply go to the ‘Advanced Sorting’ menu you will see that the attributes are not there, obviously because they are not part of the report itself.

Here comes the trick. Just add the attributes to the report, define the sorting and then remove them. Go again into the ‘Advanced Sorting’ menu and you will see that they are still there. Neat!

So now, when you execute the report and select your attributes from the object prompt in any combination, the Analytical Engine will know how to deal with them. Even if you play with the position of the attributes (rows, columns or page-by) the sorting options will be maintained.

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server query flow

Engine, Metadata

The main components of MicroStrategy Intelligence Server are:

  1. Intelligence server bus
  2. Intelligent Cubes server
  3. Communication layers for the metadata and data warehouse
  4. SQL Generation Engine
  5. Query Engine
  6. Analytical Engine

The query flow below describes the primary functions of each component.

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server query flow

  1. The MicroStrategy Intelligence Server receives a report request from any interface.
  2. The request is passed to the Intelligence Server bus, which coordinates all the tasks necessary to execute the report.
  3. Intelligence Server first checks the cache to see whether the report results are already there. The report results will already be in cache if another user or a schedule previously ran the report. If a cache exists, Intelligence Server skips directly to step 9.
  4. If no valid cache exists for the report, the Intelligence Server bus obtains the report definition and application objects from the metadata.
  5. The bus sends this information to the SQL Generation Engine. The SQL Generation Engine creates the optimized SQL, specific to the database being used. The SQL passes are then returned to the bus.
  6. The bus sends the SQL to the Query Engine. The Query Engine runs the SQL against the data warehouse and the report results are returned to the bus.
  7. The Intelligence Server bus invokes the Analytical Engine. Additional calculations are performed as necessary (when the calculation is unavailable in the database being used), and the Analytical Engine formats the results. The results are returned to the Intelligence Server bus.
  8. Depending on the analytical complexity of the report, the results might be passed back to the SQL Generation Engine for further processing by the database. Only MicroStrategy can provide this collaborative analysis with the database, resulting in forms of queries that can only be solved by MicroStrategy. In this case, steps 4–6 are repeated until the final report results are obtained. Finally, the formatted results are returned to the client communication layer.
  9. The Intelligence Server passes the formatted results back to the client.

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I had this article for around 2+ years in my archives. Most probably this is an internal MicroStrategy document. If you are © owner and want me to pull this down, please post a comment. There is a link to post comment. I come to know about any comment on blog as soon as it happens. If you can help me with the origin/source of this document, please help me. This is the first post on this blog which is not straight from heart, but hope I don’t deviate from it.