MicroStrategy Interview Questions revisited

Recently I had to revist the 101 MicroStrategy Interview Question bank and I realized that there were a lot of repeated questions, not so useful question, etc. I scrubbed the questions and here is new improved set. Remember: these are with prospective of an Interviewer. If you have your won question bank and wish to publish, comment here. I’ll contact you. Full credit given.

Warehouse

1. What is fact constellation schema?
2. What is star schema?
3. What is snowflake schema?
4. What is a surrogate key?
5. Why do we use a staging area?
6. Why do we need a DW?
7. How much history should we have in a DW?
8. What are the most important tables in a DW?
9. Why Kimball? Why not Inmon? Or vice versa?
10. Performance with a relational based query vs dimensional?
11. What schema is used in your project? Why?
12. What are conformed dimensions?

General Knowledge (Applies to all roles)

1. What is metadata?
2. What is two-tier connection?
3. What is three-tier connection?
4. What is difference between 2, 3 and 4 tier connections?
5. How do you achieve schema object version control (similar to VSS)?
6. What are different kinds of objects in MicroStrategy?
7. What’s fact table?
8. Where is Administrator’s password stored? Is it stored in encrypted?
9. Why do we use dimensional modeling in DW? Why not Relational?
10. What is a batch?
11. Differences between ROLAP, MOLAP and HOLAP?
12. What is ETL?
13. What types of DW’s are most common?
14. How many MSTR projects have you worked?
15. What are the types of MSTR objects available?
16. Explain the step-by-step technical approach after you get the Requirements from the Client.
17. What’s a System call error? Have you seen Object variable error?
18. Have you ever manually edited the metadata? why?

Architect

1. Should you have DATE as ID attribute form?
2. What is compound key?
3. What is a fact and an attribute?
4. What are Factless facts?
5. What are Transformations? Is there any transformations implemented in your project?
6. Explain Fact Structure(types, one by one)
7. Explain Level Extension. How it is used in your project?
8. Explain Fact Relation.
9. Explain Fact Degradation.
10. What is Compound Key Attribute? Give example from your project.
11. Can you update a table in Warehouse using MicroStrategy?
12. How will you resolve an issue when (by chance) an aggregate table at higher level has a higher LTS than an aggregate table at lower level?
13. What happens if LTS is high for a higher level table?
14. What are the criteria used by the MicroStrategy SQL Engine to build the join tree of a report’s SQL?
15. Can MicroStrategy logical primary keys and the true (warehouse) primary keys differ?
16. Oracle has a pseudo column named ROWID which is not “directly” exposed to front-end? Can this table be used in MicroStrategy? Why one would do that?
17. Can you create Schema objects in 2 tier connection? Is it recommended?

Reporting

1. What is the difference between RW document and HTML document?
2. What’s smart metric?
3. What is a bridge/relationship table?
4. How will you resolve double counting in M-M relationship between two attributes?
5. What is a CUBE?
6. What are differences between View Filter and Report Filter?
7. What are the different types of Filters available? Explain each with example.
8. What is derived metrics? Explain the example from your project.
9. What are Prompted Filters or cascaded prompts?
10. How will you customize the display for Null Values?
11. Can you enable/disable the thresholds based on some condition/prompt answers?
12. In a Document, there are 5 reports and 5 out of them need to have a prompt so that 10 user can select first day of the week for which user want to execute the report. How many prompts would be required to be made?
13. What’s XML Cache?
14. What’s a Bulk export report?
15. Can you have a prompt in free form SQL report?
16. What will happen when the network connection between the webserver and one of the clustered I-server is lost? Will report run smoothly?
17. Can you prioritize report execution?

 Administration

1. What is ScanMD?
2. What is MD Doctor?
3. What is clustering?
4. How will you reset password of all users?
5. What are different modes you can run I-Server?
6. How can you make sure that I-Server would be running even if the application mode has crashed and how to get back the instance?
7. What are various authentication modes?
8. How can you configure WH authentication?
9. Does DLS affect MicroStrategy? What you need to do incorporate it?
10. What is Object Manager?
11. What will you do when I-Server crashes?
12. What will you do if your Administrator has forgotten password or the account is locked?
13. How can you monitor the error received while running I-Server and report?
14. Attribute role, Security role, Security filter and Access control?
15. How to create an event based schedule?
16. Can MicroStrategy be installed on Solaris or UNIX w/o Root access? Can such a server be (re)started?
17. If you have a Quad core CPU and MSTR license to use CPUs, can you set to use two particular cores dedicatedly for I-Server (As other core may have been programmed for some other dedicated work)
18. Drawbacks on 4GT switch?
19. Can you cap the number of reports run at a time by users? What happens when this limit is breached?
20. Can you some how disable Web users to use only one I-Server?

Narrowcast Server

 Looking for questions.

 Web SDK

1. Can you make a floating window in MicroStrategy Web?
2. How to have two images in MicroStrategy login page?
3. Can you apply themes to MicroStrategy Web? How to create a one?
4. After a bulk export report is run, NCS puts it on an ftp location? Can this location be directly made available in MSTR web?

 Desktop SDK

 Looking for questions.