Extracting Long Description using Command Manager


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MicroStrategy

About two weeks ago!

Received an SOS email from Kiran asking the method to extract the Long Description of Metrics using Command Manager. Not worked on CM much other than some bulk generation of attributes/facts, in past. Search on knowledge base and found the cause. There are predefined CM scripts that would let us do 80% of things that Command Manager can do, but rest 20% (the real gem) is not made available through scripts, but the documentation is available. Make sense as CM is not a widely used tool (though it is very powerful) and its uses are very limited.

Anyways, the script to populate Long Description would be as follows:

GET PROPERTIES (property1, property2, … , propertyN) FROM METRIC “<object_name>” IN FOLDER “<location_path>” FOR PROJECT “<project_name>”

Property Number List

  1. NAME
  2. ID
  3. DESCRIPTION
  4. LOCATION
  5. CREATIONTIME
  6. MODIFICATIONTIME
  7. OWNER
  8. LONGDESCRIPTION
  9. HIDDEN

I couldn’t check the following when I worked on MicroStrategy 9 but as per my friend, Command Manager is integrated with MicroStrategy Web. OR let me put other way, it is very easy to generate the CM manager scripts using MicroStrategy Web SDK, otherwise people would have had to generate/code the Meta data code/SQL. This will make a lot of work related to SDK a lot easy to be integrated into Web as we can make a CM scripts to be executed instead of writing a lenghty code to be executed. Stay tuned, I’m expecting this integration somewhere in Sept and will post about it then.

Field Report


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MicroStrategy 9,

Last week I’ve attended a Free BI Class organized by MicroStrategy in Toronto, to see what’s new.

The presentation was really well planned – a mix of the usual sales pitch and a nice hands on web and desktop exercises.
Some new (at least to me) things that they’ve been working on are a great looking app for iPhone and some new geographic widgets, so heads up BigDataLabs. The app comes as no surprise, now that Apple no longer supports Flash. It takes advantage of the iPhone controls, including the G-sensor.

As a side note, there was a SAS training on the same floor as the Free BI Class, and the participants seemed to have a lot of fun in there, judging by their laughter. Our MSTR sales guy came with an awesome explanation – “Probably someone said it can be deployed in three months” :)

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.