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.