Recent years have seen the emergence of self-service and data visualization vendors such as Tableau, Power BI and Qlik Sense that has forced enterprise BI players such as MicroStrategy to improvise their tools to compete with these vendors. I have been a solutions architect in the field of BI been using MicroStrategy for more than 10 years. From my perspective as an architect, I appreciate the power of the underlying SQL engine in MicroStrategy and do not foresee self-service vendors replacing MicroStrategy as an enterprise BI tool in the coming years. What thrills me most as a Solutions Architect in
In the spirit of exploring new visualizations, I wanted to learn how to create a Sankey diagram within MicroStrategy Desktop (also known as Visual Insight in web). A Sankey diagram is used to visually explain flow or many to many relationships with respective proportions. The visualization needs a source attribute, target attribute, and measure to size the path or flow. In order to support the visualization, I grabbed data off of http://www.starwars.com/databank. The databank also had images I could leverage as a twist on the visual format. Cross referencing IMDB, I created a list of popular characters by Star Wars
Business Intelligence as a field has gained rapid maturity over a period of time. We are living in an era when we constantly hear buzzwords like Big Data, Prescriptive Analytics and Data Science. In the midst of these catchy phrases, the one phrase that still stands out for me is Self-Service BI. Self-Service BI is defined as an approach that enables business users to access and work with corporate data even if they do not have a background in Business Intelligence. This approach is primarily intended to reduce dependency of business users on IT for creating their reports. In the
MicroStrategy prefers de-normalized snowflake schemas, but this does not mean it is always necessary to “snowflake” your dimensions. MicroStrategy architecture can work with a star schema as well. This article coves various design considerations for MicroStrategy that includes techniques for certain situations to make MicroStrategy perform as well with a star schema as it does with snowflake schema.
Every snowflake/star schema requirement specific to MicroStrategy is outlined and explained below. In addition, most of these techniques are the preferred way for any Data Mart, regardless of the reporting tool you use.
The Call Center Clipboard is a powerful mobile app that provides call center directors and managers a “digital clipboard” for them to literally walk amongst their call center employees while staying connected to important information on their smart phone or tablet.
iOLAP has released a new Mobile BI App for Auto Dealers using MicroStrategy’s Mobile App Development Platform. The Dealer Dashboard is a powerful mobile app that delivers some useful benefits to auto dealerships–from executive management to sales associates working with customers.