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.
Having recently upgraded to MicroStrategy 9.0, I’ve been forced to reanalyze a lot of reports that “just worked”…prompted of course by angry end users whose report generation moved from 20 seconds to “Error – Time Out” at ten minutes.
Why didn’t I catch this in development? Well, when I did all of my testing, as a full access desktop user, I don’t have any SQL Security…and that changes everything. As I’ve said before, I’m a heavy user of consolidations (see here), add when you add these to multiple metrics (all full outer joins), multiple filters, etc…sometimes, things can go wrong, especially when you have SQL Global Optimization with MicroStrategy 9.0. Consolidations are fickle things…and the more complicated that you make them, the more that can go wrong.
First step is to check your SQL, and thanks to MicroStrategy Technical support (big thanks!), I was able to learn something new…if you see the metric name GODWFLAGc_1, then you pretty much know that your SQL optimization engine is kicking in; you can change it.
In your VLDB Settings, check Query Optimizations…in my specific instance, I had to change the Global settings (see pic) to force the SQL to work properly, line by line. The more it tried to fix the SQL, the more it broke it. Hey, it’s not perfect…but it gives you as the ability to tweak it yourself.
Click through for full size
February 10, 2010: Please find the latest version here: MBsetupV2.0.exe
July 25, 2009: Thanks to your feedback, version 1.1 is already available here.
For the last months I’ve been working on a new program which would act as a platform for many kinds of new functionalities. This program is called “Metadata Browser” and you can already download the Beta version here (newer version available here).
So far, Metadata Browser enables any user to navigate through a project, retrieve and export components, dependents and recurring dependents, and search by ID.
Please bear in mind that I’m learning SDK and VBA as I go, so don’t be too harsh if you find a bug. Instead, please write me at the email address displayed in the “About” window and give me an opportunity to improve this software. I would also be very happy to receive ideas on new features that you may wish to see in Metadata Browser.
If you reach that moment where you want to uninstall Metadata Browser, please be aware that on x64 operating systems the uninstall feature doesn’t work. Since the registries are not affected by this program, it’s enough to manually remove the files and shortcuts.
This is a read only application. Using it won’t cause any change to your Metadata.
Under your Administration Drop Down Menu in Microstrategy is “Events”. What is this odd item, and what’s it used for?
Keeping Command Manager extras out of this…and sticking with the straight “Out of the Box” functions…let me tell you why this matters.
One of the advantages of MicroStrategy in the ability to subscribe to reports. When a person subscribes to a report…the project caches that report for a predesignated period of time, in my case 24 hours. These report caches are cleared at predesignated times (see here for that how-to); however, as any administrator who works with ETL processes knows, sometimes you get the managerial, “I need the ETL run right now so I can see X transaction that was just posted.” All fine and dandy, until you realize that all of the reports that he ran this morning, still have a cache in place? Check the “Cache Monitor” under your Administration menu to see what’s out there.
The way to solve this is to create an event like above called “Database Load”, and then create an administration event that clears the cache linked to the event “Database Load”. Then, run your ETL. When the process is done, go to your Event option under the menu again, and trigger the appropriate event. Every Scheduled Item linked to that event will then take place.
Users can create schedules that update reports not only at set time (midnight, 4 A.M.), but also based on a series of events. Need that Balance Sheet repopulated when the Books Close, or maybe, you need to Idle a project when you’re in production? Event manager is a simple way to organize what would normally be a manual process.
As I am sure many of you have found, Narrowcast can be fickle sometimes and may miss a report distribution or two (especially when using presql to check your audit tables). Anybody have any thoughts as to a way to create a list of the current day’s scheduled distributions and how to audit that those things actually went out? I did some google searches for auditing automated email distributions and didn’t come up with much…
Then again, I am hesitant to put too much effort into Narrowcast since it will be replaced with distribution services whenever we decide to make the eventual leap of faith to Microstrategy 9.
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