Category Archives: Architect

MSTR 9.0.1 (Release 2) and it’s New Features

MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 (9.0.1 products) is now available on the download site.

What are the new features in MSTR 9 R2 (9.0.1)

1) Jump Start Project

2)  MicroStrategy Health Center

1) JUMP-START PROJECT

                                    What is the Jump-Start Project?   

Jump-Start is a complete MicroStrategy project that comes with 7 dashboards and 30 reports and all the underlying metrics, filters, attributes, and dimensions.  All you have to do is add data and rewire.  It was designed with one purpose in mind – to help you develop a complete MicroStrategy Project FAST! 

                                     How does Jump-Start Work?  

MicroStrategy’s Jump-Start Project provides the standard building blocks of any project, attributes and facts, and uses those objects to create application objects such as metrics, filters, reports, enterprise documents, and dashboards.  Because a specific project has yet to be defined, all of these objects use generic names as placeholders.   You redefine/rewire the attributes and facts so that they work off your data tables, and due to the object oriented design of MicroStrategy, the data will be cascaded into the pre-built reports and dashboards automatically. With all this work prebuilt, the Jump-Start project delivers a complete BI project in a matter of a few hours

Manuals are available in MicroStrategy site.

2) MicroStrategy Health Center

MicroStrategy Health Center allows users to prevent, diagnose and fix problems in a MicroStrategy system.  It detects known problems and provides an immediate solution to many of them.  

Health Center can email a system administrator if it encounters a problem with the system. In cases where Health Center cannot fix a problem immediately, it enables users to bundle relevant system information, such as log files, into a diagnostic package and transmit the package to MicroStrategy Technical Support for review and troubleshooting. 

  • MicroStrategy Health Center can only operate on MicroStrategy 9.0.1.
  • By default, MicroStrategy Health Center is installed and turned off (not configured). To start configuring MicroStrategy Health Center, please see the tech note below:
    • TN32554 How to Configure a MicroStrategy Health Center System
  • If MicroStrategy Health Center is already configured, to learn more about what common tasks can be carried out, please see the tech note below:
    • TN32552 How to use MicroStrategy Health Center Console
  • For a List a Current System Checks:
    • TN32551  A List of System Checks for MicroStrategy Health Center
  • MicroStrategy is constantly extending the functionality of Health Center by developing new system checks and information collectors, and refining existing ones. To keep the Health Center System up to date:
    • TN32553 How to keep the Health Center System up to date

Source: MicroStrategy’s Technical Email

“Outer Join” in MicroStrategy

During the past few weeks, I was confronted with many interesting tasks of the MicroStrategy world. And once again I had to annoy me about the fact that there is no clever way to MicroStrategy, an outer join between the attributes to be generated.

In Menu Data / Data Options / Calculations / attribute – join method can be adjusted, although, as the connection is to be made between the attributes, but these settings will lead to a difficult to understand SQL, the unexpected also depending on the situation to a conclusion can lead (more) in one of the next post.

In addition to the modification of views, there is another common workaround, which is to create a dummy metric, which is defined for each combination of attributes.  This metric will be hidden in the OLAP area, or via formatting in the report. Example of such a metric would be a simple constant function Sum (0).

Such a dummy metrics produces the same result as if all the attributes of the template would be linked to a FULL OUTER JOIN.

But what if you want some attributes with a FULL OUTER JOIN, and then connect the other with LEFT OUTER JOIN?  A simple idea would be to modify the metric by means of dimensionality, namely, the LEFT OUTER JOIN attributes with the setting ignore add / None.

Great idea, but does not work!  From a no apparent reason, no metric dimensioned in MicroStrategy can be “conducting”, ie standing in a LEFT OUTER JOIN on the left side. Too bad!

The original article in German language can be read here.

Solution for not able to add tables in Warehouse Catalog

Issue: Not able to add tables/views to the Schema in Warehouse Catalog

Error: ‘Error adding Table(s) to the schema. This key is already associated with an element of this collection’

Solution in MSTR 9:

1) Open ‘Architect’,

2) Right click the table <table name>

3) Add to the project

4) once its added, Right table in Left Pane and update structure

5) Save and close (it will ask for Update Schema, so do the same

6) Now open Warehouse Catalog

7) you can see the table/view added to schema

Selecting a BI Package – Proof of Concept

The selection of a BI software package can be a difficult process to go through. There are alot of things to consider when making such a decision such as what your specific needs are as an organization, what skill sets your organization has available for support, hardware considerations, and cost. Here are a few ideas that might be useful when selecting your next Business Intelligence solution.

  1. Determine what hardware and operating systems the package is compatible with. Have the sales team document and lay this out up front, so you know if you have the skillset, software licenses, and hardware to use the package in the first place.
  2. Further layout what the additional costs will be for procuring software/hardware, purchasing support, and hiring or training a proper skill set. This will help you get to a total cost of ownership. Understand what the annual support fee structure is like.
  3. Make sure to walk through the development process. Often times, proof of concepts revolve around software capabilities, but it is just as important to look under the hood. A complicated development process can lead to many problems down the road for development and maintenance. Not all development processes are created equal.
  4. Every BI tool seems to come with a license for each function of the software. Licensing can get pretty complicated, so make sure you understand what each license covers. It really helps to lay it out in some form of spreadsheet, so you can total up how much licensing will cost based on what you select.
  5. Understand the capabilities of each package, simplify them into common terms across all packages, and attempt to compare these capabilities, apples to apples. Such capabilities might include OLAP, caching, scheduling, delivery, pixel perfect reporting, dashboarding capabilities, report development interface, user interface, architecting process, SQL generation, etc.
  6. Understand the technology behind the OLAP that is being delivered and determine if this will serve your organization adequately. Is the technology multi dimensional OLAP or relational OLAP? Multi dimensional OLAP performs faster, but also requires that data be stored physically on the platform. Relational OLAP may be slower, but sits directly on your EDW and usually is more flexible when expanding the scope of data that is to be reported. HOLAP which is a hybrid OLAP utilizes relational OLAP, but also allows for caching of data which can improve performance. Beware that caching may be sold as a multi-dimensional OLAP alternative, but there are limitations to caching’s effectiveness. In the past this was mainly limited by the RAM size of your BI server, but as technology advances, caching becomes more and more useful.
  7. Is it important to develop a proof of concept on your own data? It is definitely nice to see your data within a sales presentation, but building a POC directly on an EDW will most likely not be possible. Most vendors will ask for downloads of data that they will then store locally on their laptop for demo purposes. Because this is normally the case, the only real benefit of doing this is so that the business can see a presentation in terms they can understand. Don’t expect to gain any other type of insight about a product because they are using your data in the POC….unless they actually decide to develop on your EDW.

Well, that’s all I can think of for now. Cheers.

Row number as Attribute

This is the statement that one can used to generate the row number as an attribute to be placed as the leftmost column on the grid.

ApplySimple(“row_number() OVER (ORDER BY #0 ASC)”, [ID COLUMN of Fact Table with maximum number of Rows])

Above statement would work for a DB2 warehouse. One need to change the statement for respective warehouse.