As promised earlier this year, Senthil Raj – author of the celebrated Object Tracking Tool, has kindly agreed to merge his application with Metadata Browser.
After much coding and testing, time has come to unveil this brand new application, which you will surely find very useful. Click here to download it.
You can also download the manual here.
So, what’s new?
- Well, there’s obviously the new and more powerful than ever Object Tracker. You can use it both to extract a simple list of objects in your project, and to generate documentation such as format, alias, formula, dimensionality, transformation and condition for metrics; lookup table, forms, child & parent relationships for attributes, etc. It behaves more or less like the Project Documentation Wizard from Desktop, with the huge difference that you can actually run all sorts of analysis on the Excel files generated by Metadata Browser, and you simply can’t do it with the HTML files generated by Desktop.
- Another upgrade that you requested is the LDAP and NT authentication modes. They are now available at login.
- Talking about the connection window, Metadata Browser is now capable of reading the most recent username that you have used for a certain project, from the registry. This will make it easier for you to login.
Enjoy!
You know how, after you execute a report, every time you make a change to the Report Data Options the report gets re-executed in order to apply those changes?
Well, in version 9 (not sure about 9.01 yet) this doesn’t happen for the Metric Join Type and Attribute Join Type options. I don’t know if this is a bug or a feature, though the behaviour appears to be intended by the developers. If someone from MicroStrategy is reading this, please provide some background details.
The downside of this is, of course, that if you are debugging a report by modifying one of those options, you might get the idea that your change had no effect whatsoever. This is because you were used with automatic re-execution after you pressed OK, as in the previous versions.
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” 
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.
This is a real breakthrough!
MicroStrategy has finally made its awesome online training available for everyone, at http://www.microstrategy.com/Education/Online/.
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