Microstrategy Blog

A friend of mine caught this link on LifeHack…Free Tableau Public…Interesting enough to play around with as long as you’re not playing with private data.

Been gearing up for finals oh loyal reader base of 3 people. I’ll get to development…during spring break (this is how I party).

Not Microstrategy

Another in the “Basic” series (because that’s about my knowledge level) .

One of the things that you might come across as an Administrator or a Project Manager is a “Time Out Error”. Now most Architects or Project management people will set this in such a way that it allows for your reports to develop, but also times out if your users somehow manage to work themselves into some sort of weird outer cross join magic.

So, say the standard 10 minutes on install isn’t enough because you’re dealing with a million rows joined to 13 tables. (It happens. Trust Me.)

Right click on your project name and select Project Configuration. Or, highlight the project you want to adjust and under the Administration Menu, select Project Configuration.

You can click through to the image below for a larger view.

On the left hand side the third option down is called Governing. This is in MicroStrategy 9 by the way, so it might be slightly different order in 8. The first option is called Results Set. As you can see in the highlighted section, this is where your interactive and scheduled reports timing is governed. Adjust them based on seconds. Keep in mind, if you make it too high, you’re going to have a cranky analyst calling and asking why his report won’t stop running, as opposed to why his report just timed out. Either way, remember it’s his fault.

Administrator, Basic Series

I remember it well. Long night spent trying to figure out how best to line metrics up next to each other. Hours spend trying to figure out if it’s more work just creating you’re own logical table to solve that stupid cross join problem that won’t go away. I’m reticent to consult the MicroStrategy web site because it really does just feel like I’m copping out…

If you have a static warehouse that the designers are committed to, what else is your option?

Late night..

Addendum: You know sometimes I forget that SQL optimization is just that…optimization. I can some time putting together a quality query that’s going to return data on a specific products ships and returns. Let’s assume that each of these products have a distinct way of being tracked. I might throw together a hand done query that populates the list of these specific reference numbers from the ship table so that I can do a left join against the shipping data so I can see specific returns against the specific ships, and then aggregate those solutions, but did you see what I just did? I went through the trouble of matching thousands of records against each other…and for what? So that I can later aggregate the data with some sort of group by.

Enter SQL optimization. Solves the problem in a quicker way that I probably wouldn’t have crossed my mind since it works in a linear fashion.

1. Get ships.
2. Get returns.
3. Left join ships to returns based on unique ID.
4. Count records in relevant columns.
5. Group by necessary items.

But…why is the detail necessary?

MicroStrategy fixes.

(
select a12.date,
count(a11.sales_number) SALES_COUNT
from sales a11
where (a11.item_desc = ‘widget’)
group by
a11.date
) pa11

full outer join

(
select a11.date,
count(a11.rma_number) RMA_COUNT
from rma a11)
where (a11.item_desc = ‘widget’)
group by
a11.date
) pa12

on
(pa11.date = pa12.date)

Makes much more sense. Why join early when all you care about is the aggregate…join on the aggregate!

Duh.

Notes From an Install

Starting Fresh.

I’m creating a Demo MicroStrategy Development install for the new place. The ultimate goal, I think is to get away from the in house development, which can be tedious, and move towards the fully SOA solution.

I already have SQL Development Server on my laptop, so I’m going to be using that as the Metadata/Statistics/History Database. I have to fun of bridging to a Teradata Database for the actual project…which is going to be interesting, considering I’ve always used SQL normalized data warehouses, so this will be a welcome change.

I’m using Windows 7 on a Dell Latitude E4300 Laptop, P9600 @ 2.53 gHz and 4 gigs of RAM. So, it should be fine for Demo Purposes.

First off, I forgot how quick the install process is (all things considered), as well as how simple the interface is for defining your various data sources. Make sure also to install the Tutorial if you’re new to the process. You can learn more from the Tutorial and Analytics projects than any manual that MicroStrategy provides, at least for me. Based on my new job functions, I’m becoming increasingly interested in the statistical modeling capabilities of MicroStrategy.

As a side note: if you want to waste some time, and you have an error on your Intelligence Server when you try to start it that states:

“Failed to start service Error Code: -1 Error Message: StartUpManager::StartUpManager():LoadServerDef failed. Return Code: 0×80041404′”

Here’s a hint for you…maybe you’re like me, and you gave the ODBC access to your MetaData read only…which is stupid. I admit it.

On with the development!! I’ll post as I see fit.

Notes From an Install

No…I’m not there.

I am, however, getting late night text messages about how awesome the bars are. Thanks guys.

MicroStrategy World