Yearly Archives: 2010

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. :)

Trick to sort on attributes inside Object Prompt


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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.

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.

BusinessObjects vs. MicroStrategy


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3rd Party, MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Inc

On the MicroStrategy-website white paper can be downloaded, tells where in 10 pages why Business Objects is beaten in all possible fields of MicroStrategy. As my readers, but certainly the decision not want to leave a competitor and is also intended for the subtle but important details of interest, I have made the following (incomplete course) to compare the features of MicroStrategy and Business Objects.

As mentioned before, I have considered only the features relevant to the SQL generation of meaning. I have also considered that MicroStrategy and Business Objects to build on fundamentally different approaches and some features are therefore not simply comparable. Such radio ions so I left aside.

The plus sign in the table means is that each tool has an important feature that for the other product would be implementable, although certainly, but unfortunately is not available.

Some “little things” that are in my view, just very important and therefore be present at every BI tool should not be missing, but in the current release of Business Objects. This is why I have marked with a minus sign.

And now the scoreboard:

Feature MicroStrategy Business Object
1 Automated Aggregate Awareness +
2 Into account the cardinality in SQL generation (eg Subquery with an M: N relationship) +
3 Dimensional metrics and conditionals +
4 Filtering using HAVING (QUALIFY is missing even in Micro Strategy) +
5 Consolidations; Dynamic Groups +
6 Assembly of the key figures within the database +
7 Joins on operators other than “=” (eg BETWEEN Join for Slowly Changing Dimensions) +
8 A simple way to choose one of the join paths (via contexts) +
9 No examination of the object dependencies when deleting –
10 No SQL-Preview for the prompt reply but before the execution –

MicroStrategy has over so much more powerful means for the rapid generation of high-performance SQL code – and that’s without taking account of VLDB countless settings that exist for the fine-tuning of the SQL query for MicroStrategy!

An important advantage of Business Objects is in my view, only the possibility of any conditions in the join between the tables to use shortcuts.

Based on Google Translator of original article.

No SQL-Preview for the prompt reply but before the execution