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.

Following are 3 different ways using which cache settings can be changed to ensure that data is always up to date for the users.  

1. Project Configuration à Caching

Above setting can be used to expire caches. If it is set to 24 hours, then the server would expire the cache 24 hours from the time the cache was first created.

e.g. If the cache was created today at 9 am, it would remain valid until tomorrow 9 am, unless the cache was invalidated for any reason.

Cache can become invalid if any object in the report/document changed, including running the report (creating cache), and saving the report (invalidating cache) and then running the report again (warehouse hit, another cache created).

Given that, 24 hours might not be the best setting because even if the warehouse updates at 5 am, the report would still show old data until 9 am, unless the cache is updated which brings us to the next one.

2. Right click Report/dashboard à Schedule Delivery To à Update Cache

You can schedule to "update" your caches, which means the report will run at a scheduled time and your caches will be updated to be used till they expire or get invalidated.

3. Desktop à Administration Menuà Schedule Administrative Tasks

An administrative scheduled task can be created to delete all caches at a scheduled time.

Using all three methods, you can ensure your data is always fresh and you are efficiently using your cache.