Thursday, October 31, 2013

How to get a list of all Disabled Users?

There are 3 ways to get a list of all Disabled users in the system


Wednesday, October 30, 2013

What is the purpose of Multi-Pass SQL?

The MicroStrategy SQL Engine uses multiple SQL passes i.e. SELECT statements to retrieve report results from the data warehouse. This enables the users to create more complex reports, and have more flexibility in answering business questions on the reports.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Data Mining, Statistics & Machine Learning

Microstrategy has integrated Data mining into its mainstream BI platform. Using this technology, users are just not limited to historical analysis but also have access to predictive analysis of their data, thereby empowering the decision makers to make more insightful decisions for their businesses.

Data Mining is extracting of useful information from data using any means such as statistical analysis, modeling techniques, machine learning or database technologies.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Report Caches Memory Capacity Planning

Report caches are first created in memory within Intelligence Server. They are later backed up to disk and reloaded into memory when accessed. If Intelligence Server memory is insufficient to hold all new requested report caches, the least recently used caches are unloaded automatically from memory to make space for the new caches.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Object Caches Overview and Best Practices

An object cache is a recently used object definition stored in the memory of Desktop and Intelligence Server. You can create object caches for both application objects (project, report, document, etc) and schema objects (facts, attributes,etc).

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Element Caches Overview and Best Practices

An element cache is a recently used attribute element list stored in memory for faster retrieval. When it hits a cache, a request for attribute elements runs against Intelligence Server memory instead of issuing a SQL statement against the database, thereby reducing response times significantly. Between 25% and 30% of all queries issued against the database in a typical BI implementation are element queries. This means that performance gains on element browsing will have a significant impact on overall system performance.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Document Caches Overview and Best Practices

Document caches are created at run time or on a schedule and behave in a manner similar to report caches. At run time, document caches are created only in MicroStrategy Web. When you execute a prompted document in MicroStrategy Web, an XML document cache is generated. When you reprompt the document, a new XML cache is generated with the data reflecting new prompt answers.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Report Caches Overview and Best Practices

MicroStrategy report caches store all report results in I-server for fast retrieval. They reduce the response time to bare minimum as compared to the reports that execute against cubes, aggregate tables, or fact tables on the data warehouse.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Understanding Caching and Recommended Best Practices!

This week is dedicated to Caching! The goal is to learn the following:

  • What is caching
  • How does caching work?
  • Different types of caching 
  • Recommendations for optimizing Caching for Hi performance results 

Friday, October 18, 2013

Microstrategy SQL Engine Framework!

MicroStrategy engine is the brain of the whole system, no exaggeration!. It consists of 3 individual engines that work in tandem to fulfill report requests submitted by MicroStrategy desktop, MicroStrategy Web and other MicroStrategy products

Thursday, October 17, 2013

How to repeat column values on every row of the grid?

Even though it seems like the most simplest things to do, trust me it is really hard to find the setting that does that.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

MSTR 9.3.1 Bug - Error handling option to deliver document upon "No data returned" does not work

If you don't want distribution services to deliver emails when there is no data returned for a report or document, then you can do that by changing the error handling setting in Project configuration.

Project Configuration -> Deliveries -> Error Handling

You can change this delivery option for both partial and no data results.

However, currently, this setting only works for reports and not for documents.

This is a known issue with MSTR 9.3.1, logged in TN32763, and is stated for a fix in the next MSTR release.

Nonetheless, there is a workaround that can be used for documents, shown in TN34054, which is nothing but creating an alert subscription on the report, to only send out email when the document contains data with some value.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

3 different ways to maintain caches to ensure up-to-date data

Creating and maintaining caches is an important part of effective Microstrategy environment management. It not only improves Microstrategy speed by fast retrieval of reports, but also reduces the load manifolds on the warehouse, and network, thereby improving overall system performance.

However, it is equally important to make sure data is always as up to date as the user would like it to be.

Monday, October 14, 2013

How to get Personalization to work in Dynamic Recipient List in MSTR 9.3.1?

Dynamic recipient list is a great new feature in MSTR 9.3.x and I think is extremely useful. It adds the capability of sending user specific personalized data for email delivery.

TN41561 explains in detail how to set up dynamic address recipient list 9.3.x. You should have the option of setting it up in web under User preferences. In case, you don't find the option, then please refer TN41710.

However, in order to get the user personalization to work, you have to populate the personalization column of your dynamic recipient table with the necessary PROMPTXML data for each of your users in the table.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Hello and welcome!

               I have been working in the field of Business Intelligence since past 4 years, and Microstrategy has been my go to tool for most of my BI tasks over the years. I have enjoyed all my roles, be it Microstrategy developer, architect or platform administrator.

               I have received my MCD (Microstrategy Certified Developer), and I continue to strive to learn as much more about this tool as I can. Through this blog I would like to share and exchange learning experiences with fellow Microstrategy mates and enjoy spreading of knowledge.