Resetting forgotton Administrator Password

Administration

Only 3 tier MicroStrategy metadata that I can run a SQL query is client’s 😥

Looking forward for people who can execute the following SQL statement directly against the MicroStrategy metadata. Perfectly legal and DMCA compliant as encryption is not broken but bypassed.

UPDATE  DSSMDUSRACCT
SET PASSWD = ‘00000000c34abc5741b1cf54247cbc76af3b513ec911585a22b95befb7e10c14’
WHERE upper(LOGIN) = ‘ADMINISTRATOR’

If above given password doesn’t work use any of following:

9c1185a5c5e9fc54612808977ee8f548b2258d31
00000000187c9eeace8a9d2b94b7b8c21d4e1d10c911585ad5674d244057eb6f

It may be very foolish of me trying to bypass the RMD 160 encryption 😀 . I don’t even know if it works. Basically the above given SQL statement rests the password to “” (nothing). As I do not have any easy access, please let me know if it works for you. You may have to change the SQL syntax of the DBMS in which your metadata is stored.

Note: I’m not responsible if your metadata is redundant due to use of the above SQL statement or use of above statement bring you issues at your job. Also, this would work only in a metadata NOT having used  in 2 tier configuration prior to execution of SQL statement. ie, you must connect to the metadata using a 3 tier connection before execution.

Intelligence Server SDK startup kit

SDK, , , ,

I happen to know a guy or two whose curiosity for Intelligence Server SDK increased alarmingly in the last couple of months. I dedicate this article to them, and anybody who would like to get their hands dirty with some cool stuff.

But first of all, what is IS SDK? Most of the SDK guys are familiar with the Web SDK, the one which allows endless customizing to the web interface of MicroStrategy, amongst other things. Intelligence Server SDK, on the other hand, deals with reading, creating, modifying and executing objects from your Metadata. One can easily consider it to be Command Manager’s big brother who went to College. Unlike Command Manager, IS SDK is anything but user friendly. But man, it packs a serious punch if you learn how to handle it! The documentation and Tech Notes do provide all the necessary information to do just about anything, but actual examples are scarce.

IS SDK can be used via Visual Basic or C++. Since I’m by no means a pure breed programmer, I work with VBA, which is more or less like speaking English to the computer.

Enough introductions already. If you want to unleash its power, the first thing you must do is connect to a project. This apparently simple task poses enough challenges to deter many an enthusiastic programmer from going any further. I find this counterproductive and quite discomforting.

This is why I assembled a startup kit customized for VB6, which offers the code and explanations on how to connect to a project. Actually, it is the exact form that I used for Metadata Browser.

Download here:
Connection.zip

Updates and new tips may come in the future, depending on your feedback.

MicroStrategy Roadshow at Mumbai

MicroStrategy Inc

I attended the MicroStrategy 9 Live Roadshow held at Hyatt hotel at Mumbai on 29th July. In short it was an so-so event.

MicroStrategy were probably totally unaware about Mumbai or its culture. Roadshow is a sales and marketing campaign for MicroStrategy, Inc and its resellers. Assuming that and the Mumbai traffic and the fact that offices easily stretch late, the event should have been scheduled at 7:00 or 7:30, the time at which it actually started. I reached there by 6:20 and till 6:45 the room had deserted look. At 6:45  there was an announcement that event would start at 7:15 as several business invitees were on way to event. I had doubt on this, but I was proven wrong. By 7:20 the room was packed and some extra chairs were arranged for the speakers, sponsors and team. Crowd would have been like 60% business (would-be customers), 30% professionals (like me) and 10% others.

The introduction was given by someone called Shankar Ganapati. A person of Indian origin for sure but defiantly now a US citizen. He gave a brief introduction about MicroStrategy, Inc and it’s initial years. That was something I was totally unaware. MicroStrategy, Inc was  a consulting company in beginning. It was hired by McDonald’s to do some reporting and analysis work and they (MicroStrategy) came up with initial version of MicroStrategy product which was a good SQL generating engine. But being impressed by the work, MicroStrategy was encouraged by McDonald’s to make one-size-fits-all solution and start selling it. Wow! Truly how big corporations were established in history. MicroStrategy has around 1600 employees and 20% of its budget goes to R&D. Total number of customer is 3300 (way below compared to what I read in a BI Surveyor’s site just a month back), 2/3rd being Fortune-2000 companies. FYI, MicroStrategy is the most coveted BI tool for Fortune-100 companies. Strangely, after this introduction Shankar vanished from event.

I read the brochure handed over during the registration and I found two new features: Journals – sending notes to others and Metadata synchronization for a distributed development team. I hardly have any idea about these two features.

Dan Stern, Director of International Reseller at MicroStrategy was handling the event. He explained the new features of MicroStrategy to everyone. Specially the Multi-source, Cube and E-mailing reports. An assistant gave the demo of the features. Well, I must say it was totally not required. I have several friends who are working with competing BI tools in India and they have done reporting only for Legal requirement. Emailing, people won’t like that idea much. Indians like to get the report delivered by offline courier instead. Unless the mentality of the top is changed, it is very tough to do business with the middle management who give advise to superiors. MicroStrategy, Inc should sell the product as a plain reporting tool to India which can “churn out all statutory required reports in 5 minutes” every quarter and and Financial Year end. People will think of BI only after they see product doing some basic stuff correctly. There would be very few forward looking enterprises or educated companies/people who would be interested in true BI and if at all, they must be having a BI solution already.Person handling risk at State bank of India, biggest bank in India, happened to be sitting next to me. I was shocked to know that they were using Excel for everything. The work is outsourced to TCS. So one can imagine the sorry state of BI implementation in India. Biggest bank in India use Excel reports to handle its risk :mrgreen: .

In Q&A session, I asked several questions. Few thing: MicroStrategy does have SME license in India, that is, they would be selling MicroStrategy product at a lower prices then the similar size peers in US. They deferred to divulge any details on pricing though. They plan to go full throttle in India. They are contacting universities for Software distribution/education like in USA. Lots of good things, but I’m still pessimistic about its sales/presence in India. MicroStrategy is far behind by numbers as well as years compared to other core BI tools. Cognos/BO were not only selling products but also having  captive offices for Development/Support (before being taken over by large corporations). MicroStrategy, Inc do not seems to be having own development center in India, even they outsource to an Indian company for last 8 years now.

After this. There was small amount of time allotted to the sponsors. Preshant Tewari from Sybase , Inc gave a brief introduction of Sybase IQ database technologies. He should have had got some 5 minutes more. Sybase showcase two business cases. One from SunTel, Srilanka and another from LoanPerformance, USA, for whom I’ve worked though the captive development center of First American Corp. Nice to know. Director of LoanPerformance had explained the POC that went deciding for the Sybase, during a visit to India office. Preshant told something unique like some competitors., they are selling Sybases boxes with MicroStrategy pre-configured. Something that I’ve heard about Teradata and Oracle doing. A win-win for both Syabse as well as MicroStrategy. After this OBSI and InfoSTEP had a very small marketing speech about their services.

In the end was drinking session followed by Dinner. I had ThumpsUp. While having the cold drink, I got to meet someone from Future Group, who purchased MicroStrategy last year. This guy (I really didn’t get his name) explained me how buying decision for purchasing various tools for BI implementation went on. Truly baffling. I was interviewed by Future Group around a year back and was very hopeful of having “final” offer letter. But didn’t make it due to my fussy nature. But I not think that way. It is lot better to that employer/employee to understand each other before employee coming on-board and face Black Swan. I just need to smart and avoid asking direct questions.

MicroStrategy, Inc totally missed that business are predominantly owned people speaking Gujarati, who are mostly pure vegetarians. There was not much veg food available. So I just had a paneer veg and roties. Food was indeed very good. After finishing the food, I tool my belonging from the event room and made a quick exit. It was already 10:40 in night.

Suggestion to MicroStrategy:

  1. Hold marketing events on Saturdays. Most of offices close by 3PM on Saturday, so that people can come in time and also spend some more time too.
  2. Do not market high-end BI solution to Indian customers. Sell on or demo what MicroStrategy must have done 15 years back or may be 10.
  3. Person showing demo should be good at English and must be aware what is he going to demo.
  4. Brochure should give some insight on licensing schemes (after all it is all about money)
  5. Demo should be localized, in fact they should do it for all counties. People don’t connect to demo based on MicroStrategy Tutorial.
  6. Broadcast loudly about the free Reporting tool. Reap benefits after two years. Indians are good in selling things to world but won’t get wooed by same selling tricks. Indians specifically love free stuff.

Triggering Narrowcast Jobs from Command Prompt

Narrowcast Server

When I was a project manager, the developers that I worked with setup the Narrowcast jobs to kick off automatically once the ETL loads had completed.  Well, I recently had to figure out for myself how to do this, and after piecing all the technologies together and reading through a few MicroStrategy support notes, I felt it would probably be a good thing to document in this blog.   The below example was performed using a Windows NT Narrowcast server.

Well, triggering Narrowcast Services, first off can be done through MicroStrategy Command Manager. If it is not installed on your Narrowcast box, first go ahead and install the application there.

You will then need to log on to your Narrowcast Meta data from Command Manager in order to test your connection.   First off, your Narrowcast implementation and Command Manager install needs to be at the same support level, so I had to first upgrade my Narrowcast application.   Second, you have to setup a system DSN for your Narrowcast Metadata.  From there, you can log on to Narrowcast Metadata from Command Manager.  Here is some sample Command Manager code for kicking off a Service:

TRIGGER SERVICE “Service Name” IN FOLDER “Applications/My Applications/Services/”;

In Command Manager, I then save this code into a .scp file.  In order to kick off this Command Manager file, we then create a windows .bat with the following commands:

if not exist c:\cmdmgr\trigger.txt goto 20

cmdmgr.exe -w SQLServer -u user -p pass -d master -s dbo.PROD -f c:\cmdmgr\job.scp -o c:\cmdmgr\output.txt

del c:\cmdmgr\trigger.txt

goto end

:20

:end

This windows first checks for a trigger file (that will be supplied by the ETL team).  If the trigger file exists, then it kicks off the .scf script and then deletes the trigger file.    If the trigger file does not exist, then the .bat files does nothing.  Shown below is the command manager line explained further:

fig61

If you are having problems with the script, just test the cmdmgr.exe line in the .bat file.   You should be able to doubleclick the .bat and the service should run almost immediately.

Once you have all the above setup, it is just a matter of scheduling the .bat file to run every so often (15 minutes in our case).   I have yet to find a true trigger solution using Narrowcast.   I always have to setup a job which runs repeatedly until a flag is set, and then the job kicks off the actual report service.   Whether this flag is a database flag or a trigger file, the word ‘trigger’ is misleading because the report service is not really being triggered by the ETL load completion.  A easier solution for triggering Narrowcast jobs would be a very nice to have in one of Narrowcast’s later releases.

Just FYI, in order to schedule the .bat file to run every 15 minutes, I went into Settings->Control Panel->Scheduled Tasks, and just created a Scheduled Task using the wizard.   Click on the Advanced push button to select a schedule that is more frequent than just once a day.

This was not rocket science, but just thought it would be something nice to document.

Metadata Browser v1.1

SDK, , ,

February 10, 2010: Please find the latest version here: MBsetupV2.0.exe

First of all I would like to thank you for your feedback and encouragements after the release of Metadata Browser v1.0 beta!

For those learning about Metadata Browser for the first time, let me say that this is an application that enables any user to navigate through a project, retrieve and export components, dependents and recurring dependents, and search by object ID.

You can download Metadata Browser v1.1 here:
MBSetupV1.1.exe

New features

  • Documentation Tool (requested)
    Ever wanted to get a detailed list of the objects created or modified for a specific demand? Look no further!
    Simply select the folder where those objects or their shortcuts* are and click on the “Documentation” button. You will get an exportable list that shows all kind of useful information about your objects (i.e. alias, format and formula for Metrics, mandatory flag for Filters and Prompts, and many others).
  • Object Type Count (requested)
    This function shows the count for each object type in the selected folder.

* Creating folders with shortcuts for each demand or release is a good practice. It also saves you a lot of time when copying those objects to other projects via Object Manager.

Fixed issues

  • The windows can be resized (requested). In the beta versions they had a fixed size.
  • All object types should be recognized now and an appropriate icon should be displayed. I’ll come back with an article on how to do this via VBA in SDK.
  • The buttons were replaced by a slick looking toolbar (requested).
  • A manual is now available.
MetadataBrowser1.1

Metadata Browser v1.1

About donations

Surprisingly enough, I got more messages encouraging me to monetize this tool than I got new requirements.

Since money is not why I started working on Metadata Browser, I resist the suggestions of attaching a price tag to it. Nevertheless, if you so feel inclined to make a donation then you now have this opportunity.

This is a read only application. Using it will cause no changes to your Metadata.