Monthly Archives: August 2010

Various types of Tables in MicroStrategy


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Architect

Most of you would be working on it w/o knowledge. Pretty nifty.

  1. Base table: Provides source data for metrics. In a given SQL pass, the base table(s) may be fact tables or previously calculated intermediate tables.
  2. Lookup table: Provides attribute IDs and descriptions. A table functions as a lookup table if its columns appear in the SELECT, WHERE or GROUP BY clauses.
  3. Relationship table: Includes at least two attribute ID columns to join attributes. A lookup table can serve as a relationship table, or it could serve as both a lookup and a relationship in the same query.
    A table functions solely as a relationship table if it appears only in the FROM clause.
    A transformation table is a special case of relationship table.
  4. Partition mapping tables: MicroStrategy warehouse and metadata partition mapping use pre-queries to determine the physical tables to use for a particular metric. Warehouse partition mapping depends on physical tables in the warehouse, which will appear at the top of the FROM clause in the pre-query.

In Star schema, there is virtually no difference between Base Table and Lookup table.

Please let me know if there is any other type of MicroStrategy table.

GIS tools for MicroStrategy


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3rd Party

This was probably long pending, but I had first hand information only about MapInfo, now called Business Insight (such a boring name) and Visual Crossing. Among MapInfo and VisualCrossing, former is lot cheaper. My ex-employer or rather client, LoanPerformance, have used both for trail and finally settled for Visual Crossing, due to the depth of GIS information, as they wanted to show the data at MSA level not just District or pointers for city. This was obvious for a company dealing into selling best and vast history of the real estate prices in USA. If you need to show the data at a higher level, MapInfo should suffice. FYI, VisualCrossing has been co-founded by MicroStrategy alumni, who has worked in MicroStrategy SDK for a decade and its integration is extremely seamless. With these tools you need to have a GIS Server that would have geo-coding information. Integration of VS after installation takes just 5 minutes and you are good to change all geography grids to maps. AFAIK, VC supports only USA and Canada where as MI have much larger support in terms of countries.

With permission from Ehsan Hoque:

  1. Visual Crossing was created by Andrew Wiggemore. He also created the MicroStrategy SDK for web. So as you can imagine, his stuff has the tightest integration with the product and hence the most rapid time to deploy.
  2. Google/Yahoo/Microsoft integration. I have done this for a few clients including a POC with Bank of America, when I was there. While the onus of maintaining the data is on Google or others, you pay them per click or per tile depending on the pricing scheme you sign up for. Now if your website is public (which I cannot imagine it is) then you do not pay them but you are limited to 50K transactions.
  3. A little known solution is Oracle Spatial. If you have Oracle, then you have Oracle Spatial. The API is very much AJAX and you can replicate Google Maps like functionality. Dan Abougov (I think I spelt the name right) at Garmin (now Nokia) will sell you all the maps and spatial data you need. The advantage of this and #1 is that you do not need a round trip to an external entity.

From Massimiliano Parcaroli

Maps4Strategy. Until now the maps are only available for Italy, but soon we will implement Europe and USA Maps. We introduce this product on November 2009 at the National Symposium Microstrategy in Milan Italy.
If you feel interested, watch the video to understand the simplicity of use and the perfect integration whit MicroStrategy Platform.
http://www.giano-solutions.com/maps4mstr/

This arguments, brings us to the conclusion that not just the tool but the depth of GIS data sources is equally important, but this depth may or may not be concern of every client. Please share your experience of using GIS tools and source data.

Metadata Browser v3.01


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Metadata, MicroStrategy, SDK,

As promised earlier this year, Senthil Raj – author of the celebrated Object Tracking Tool, has kindly agreed to merge his application with Metadata Browser.

After much coding and testing, time has come to unveil this brand new application, which you will surely find very useful. Click here to download it.

You can also download the manual here.

So, what’s new?

  • Well, there’s obviously the new and more powerful than ever Object Tracker. You can use it both to extract a simple list of objects in your project, and to generate documentation such as format, alias, formula, dimensionality, transformation and condition for metrics; lookup table, forms, child & parent relationships for attributes, etc. It behaves more or less like the Project Documentation Wizard from Desktop, with the huge difference that you can actually run all sorts of analysis on the Excel files generated by Metadata Browser, and you simply can’t do it with the HTML files generated by Desktop.
  • Another upgrade that you requested is the LDAP and NT authentication modes. They are now available at login.
  • Talking about the connection window, Metadata Browser is now capable of reading the most recent username that you have used for a certain project, from the registry. This will make it easier for you to login.

Enjoy!

Report Data Options in version 9


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MicroStrategy 9,

You know how, after you execute a report, every time you make a change to the Report Data Options the report gets re-executed in order to apply those changes?

Well, in version 9 (not sure about 9.01 yet) this doesn’t happen for the Metric Join Type and Attribute Join Type options. I don’t know if this is a bug or a feature, though the behaviour appears to be intended by the developers. If someone from MicroStrategy is reading this, please provide some background details.

The downside of this is, of course, that if you are debugging a report by modifying one of those options, you might get the idea that your change had no effect whatsoever. This is because you were used with automatic re-execution after you pressed OK, as in the previous versions.