Yearly Archives: 2009

MicroStrategy 9 BI Classes


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MicroStrategy

Attended MicroStrategy 9i BI Class today. Real good BI tool & lot of good things on the MicroStrategy 9. MicroStrategy, Inc identified lot of previous issues and resolved with this new version. I have worked in the Data warehouse environment more than 10 years starting from MicroStrategy 6 , 7i , 8 and now 9.

The main differentiating points compared to other BI tools:

  1. OLAP Cube + ROLAP / HOLAP together using MicroStrategy Architect.
  2. While drilling it can go from predefined cube to regular reports to detail level executed from database. No tool supports this. I liked this very much.The problem with other tools are:
    While building cube you need to specify all of the levels / dimensions into one cube , there is no way you can link multiple cubes link together in other tools. But In New version of MicroStrategy, it is supported.
  3. Dashboards are really interactive, I am sure users are going to like it very much.
  4. Way to implement quick & dirty way of importing excel data sources directly to MicroStrategy & do the quick Proof of concept to satisfy immediate needs of urgent user without going through the regular ETL Process & getting the data out through DB.
    — This satisfy the short term goals of any BI Project to show the progress quickly & it would be temporary solution until the actual and real proper solution. And also Quick Proof of Concepts.
    Since I experienced with lot of bigger clients they wanted immediate needs of some analysis , I happened to hard code some of the stuff and put into table directly & do similar approach & configure in the MicroStrategy as a separate projects to satisfy the short term solutions. But now it is going to be the quick through regular MicroStrategy project itself.
  5. Prepackaging integration of schema objects from distributed team environment also good. Because most of the BI projects are in the distributed environment nowadays. It is kind of similar to sending Cognos metadata files & migration.
  6. Lot of things which were only possible through MicroStrategy Desktop, now regular business users can do, so less problem for the IT team to support these kind of Public object creation & Maintenance.
  7. Creating Dashboard made it very easy in MicroStrategy 9.
  8. Web Single Sign On (SSO) is added through configuration.
  9. MicroStrategy architect user interfaces seems to be easy now. Concept wise it is same thing.

MicroStrategy 9 GA Features


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MicroStrategy 9

Dashboard Features:
 Easy to add Tabs and report layouts(Panels)
 Default templates available to choose the number of reports per tab
 Tab adding is just clicking plus sign(+)
Drilling is possible in AJAX or DHTML mode
 All, Total features are introduced and bugs are fixed
 Many graph issues in 8 are fixed in 9

Prompt & Filter
Prompt and Filter can be created in WEB
 New web options for prompt values display, Search in list view, drop down box and many new web options for filter and prompt
Total, Sub Total
 Advanced totaling, Display options (What ever available in Desktop, same features are now available in WEB

Derived Elements
 After report execution; kind of consolidation and partial custom group is possible (but actual cons and cus grp) and derived element can be saved and reuse the same.
 Example: Jan+feb or making Jan& Feb row together as ‘Winter’ and or total of MAR+APR
Threshold
 Threshold is possible in WEB on the fly. It’s just slider bar…you can set many thresholds with different color just on the fly.

Document Report
 Reports can be placed parallel in document report

Back & Forward button
 In MSTR-8, if you click on IE back button, session will be expired. But in MSTR-9, inside the MSTR-9 web there is option for back & forward.
 Suppose you applied some total, formatting, formula on the fly and if like to switch to old one, you can just click on back button

Preferences, Notes, Screens
 Extra preference like web colors, etc
 Different screen in MSTR 8, like menus and icons
 Folders/objects can be viewed in tree view (expand like windows explorer)

Delivery Service in WEB (new feature like Narrowcast server):
 It looks in the upcoming MSTR version, Narrowcast component won’t be there
 Delivery service: you can subscribe reports for email or folder, or you email reports directly.
 You add many email IDs, subscription
 Everything in WEB
Note: you cannot import LDAP or SMTP server emails from server, its has been raised as enhancement request, may be in 9.x we can expect.
Note: Dynamic subscription not possible in delivery service, next version may have (Not sure)

CUBE (New very big feature)
 Cube is kind of Cognos Cube. You can pull many attributes and metrics into metrics as cube report. And when you link other normal reports with cube report, it will fetch data from cube report.
 Cube report can scheduled
 Cube object deleted, reports linked to cube report won’t work.
 There cube at user level, grp level and many things are there…you can find more details in website or help in MSTR-9.

CUBE Advisor: (Another big feature)
 If I have to say in one line: it will advise you to make how many reports can be converted to cube link report

Admin:
 Many new features in MSTR 9 Admin
Special one: Users, Grps, Sec.Filters can be created in WEB under Admin login.

Architect: (New component in MSTR DESKTOP)
 Like BO, OBIEE tools here you can make table level relationships.
 No need to add key attributes as a child/parent.
 Its good component, this is what we were looking from MSTR.
 Still doing many testing, investigation on some of the scenarios, so will post more once I complete the analysis.

Multiple Sources:
 Multiple source can used, differentiae the tables with colors……
Metric name can be removed (no more “Metric” name in reports)

Other features;
 New data types (like NCHAR, Binary data type)
 New SQL tuning properties
 New OLAP functions
 New forecasting functions
 Temp table indexing
 Data mining functions
 Linking websites in dashboard
 Banding
 Portlet to portlet (web linking feature)
 Multi select rows, columns on the fly and do manipulations.
 Watermark in documents, reports background
 Linking report from dashboard
 Personalized Prompt Answers
 Metadata and Data can be in same DB
 Importing delivery service from NCAST to Delivery service
 64 bit-Windows supported
 64 bit web server supported
 Command manager, Object manager, Project merge, desktop license are separate now.
 Eclipse can be linked to WEB files and easy to customize the MSTR WEB 9
 Now Caching can be done at EXCEL, WORD,XML, HTML CSV format (means when you export report it can be cached at excel level)

AND many more new features……will post when ever come across……

How to hide Metric column in MicroStrategy


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Metrics, MicroStrategy

For hiding Metric column only in Web: (assuming that English language was the Locale.)

  1. On the Web Server machine, go to the default location of Web ASPxWEB-INFclassesresources and open up the file called MessagesBundle_en_US.properties.
  2. Go to the line ‘mstrWeb.1158’. For English language, ‘Metrics’ is the value.
  3. Delete the word ‘Metrics’ and leave one single space.
  4. Save the close the file.
  5. Restart Web server.

Note: If an environment is being accessed by users that may not be using the project default language, the administrator will need to go in and modify each MessageBundle properties file for that respective language and clear the mstrWeb.1158 Metrics reference.

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For hiding Metric column in Desktop for Reports and RS documents.

1st method

  1. Goto Grid menu and check that Automatic Column width is disabled.
  2. Place the mouse between the Metrics column and the first metric on the report. Then, drag the column to the left until it is no longer present on the report:.

2nd method

  1. Open Options under Grid menu.
  2. Open tab Columns and Rows.
  3. Select radio button Fixed.
  4. Select Metric from dropdown menu and set 0 as pixen as width.

Search by ID is dead. Long live Search by ID!


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MicroStrategy, SDK

It appears that someone at MicroStrategy was receptive enough to come up with the idea of including a search by ID function in version 9. It’s called… “Search by ID” (act surprised now) and it can be found under the Tools menu of the “Search for Objects” window.

This, and the new “Translate” function in MicroStrategy 9 render my “Search by ID v2” application almost obsolete. I refrain from calling it completely obsolete for the sole reason that it still offers the direct and recurring dependents export to Excel function. To the date I still haven’t found a recurring dependents search function in MicroStrategy Desktop.

By the way, since I was confronted with a case when this tool was not able to find an object, I feel compelled to add a small tech note. If the user you log in with doesn’t have the right to “see” a particular object, then of course this object won’t be found by Search by ID v2. This may happen if the object you are looking for is placed in a colleague’s personal folder, or if that object has some kind of “Deny all” permission set for your user/usergroup.