- SQL Engine
-Ease of mobile BI development and deployment
-Scaleability
- Security (encryption) with compression
- Idea for enterprise wide BI delivery
- SQL Engine
-Ease of mobile BI development and deployment
-Scaleability
- Security (encryption) with compression
- Idea for enterprise wide BI delivery
It needs better EM logging. EM is MicroStrategy enterprise manager which logs usage and stats. It has becomes very difficult over last couple of years to use this feature to have a BI environment rolled out to users.
MicroStrategy customer support including premium support is pretty bad in handling product level question or defects..which leads to lots of dissatisfaction for a customer
I think it shall be very helpful if the future versions allow much more customization following a simpler procedure
I think it would be very helpful if the future versions allow much more customization and simplify this procedure.
The customisation was difficult.
There was no issue with the stability.
There was no issue with the scalability.
My advice would be that it's a great product especially for reporting but you should also keep in mind that in the end it is still a product and it can't replicate all that can be achieved through a code or a full fledged database.
It helps to provide answers quickly for critical business questions. It has reduced our time spent on data entry and manipulation and can identify areas for cost cutting.
The setup is quite complex and requires extra configurations.
We've used it for two years.
It's good.
It has a complex set-up. It requires configuration of its Intelligence Server and Metadata.
I have implemented it for different clients.
If you are having small business set-up then you have to go for QlikView, else MicroStrategy is more stable for big organizations.
Architecture
=========
In a nutshell, Microstrategy (or MSTR for short) architecture is composed of three layers
1 - Web/Mobile interface that connects to any given Intelligent Server (middleware)
2- Middleware (Intelligent Server) that
a. connects to data layer (many connectors included in the default license)
b. executes created SQL/MDX queries, OLAP functions
c. Generates pre-loaded MOLAP cubes (aka Intelligent Cubes) to speed up results (if defined)
3 - Data Access: Access to your DataWarehouse (no need to be dimensional model, but recommended) using any of the several included connectors
Attributes and Facts definition
======================
Using Microstrategy Architect you basically define:
a. Attributes and attribute forms (which corresponds to the Dimensions in the Dimensional Model)
b. Facts (which corresponds to Facts)
c. System Hierarchy or relationship of Attributes to Facts. Here it is where you also define your Star or Snowflake model for your attributes. Also (and this is a really cool feature) same Fact can be located at different aggregation levels either because you have it in the datasource (e.g an agg view) or because you ask a given FACT in MSTR to extend the value to another level. This is interesting to enhance performance using tables with pre-processed aggregated data, instead of letting MSTR calculate aggregations "on the fly"
d. User Hierarchy: or drill-in paths to see the information in your reports / Documents
Report and Dashboard Generation
=========================
Then you can start creating :
- Measures: Formulas (e.g KPIs) that uses Facts or other measures
- Reports which are data sets of attributes and Measures (here you can also use other type of objects like filters, consolidations, custom groups,etc...). You can see and export these datasets in a variety of formats (Excel, PDF, etc...) However the top use case for this report is as datasource for Documents/Dashboards
- Dynamic Documents and documents: You include "n" number of reports as your datasource and then represent using the widgets (Tabs, Tables, Heat Maps, ESRI Maps, ...) These are ultimately the Dashboards or final reports that end user will see and - here it comes the most valuable feature of MSTR from my point of view- either from Web or from mobile device - So you can quickly compose a mobile dashboard in few clicks if (and only if) you have created the right data model (e.g a solid DWH schema). At this point it is worth to mention that MSTR allows you to iteratively enhance the model and reports/dashboards (so no big-bang deployment needed)
- You can also create predictive analysis (datamining) using some of the techniques and gadgets provided as well as interactively play with data and come to conclusions using MSTR Visual Insight (kind of an 'slice and dice data' tool). Outputs from those analysis may be dashboards/documents.
Scheduler
========
Reports and Documents can be run on demand or can be scheduled to be generated and sent to target audience. Scheduler is also responsible of the Intelligent cubes refreshing (MOLAP recreation at a regular basis)
Microstrategy licensing model allows:
===========================
a. Access to all tools available (recent change, one year ago more or less) - before you had to license certain tools, now you have access to all tools in either on-premise installation or Cloud. Interesting Tools
b. In the on-premise installation model, licenses per user and therefore have high scalable BI solutions: In this licensing model you can deploy your architecture (Web Front-end and Middleware or Intelligent Sever) in as many servers you want.
Before we used Microstrategy at Xerox Services (HR services) we used to analyze data using Spreadsheets, to calculate and report on service SLAs and KPIs.
No need to mention how using MSTR has enhanced the process since then but a couple of the key benefits are:
- Data access not affecting transactional systems (data sources)
- Complex calculations (SLAs, KPI rules) right there on time when needed and always right or always wrong but centralized in a single place where formulas can be corrected if needed
Probably this is not MSTR's fault but BI tool in general: sometimes trying to follow MSTR rules to get some formulas and data using MSTR techniques is harder (and less performant) than just prepare yet another DWH view collecting needed data (with needed inner or left outer joins and aggregations) and just model that new view in MSTR.
Also MSTR, as all these BI tools, generate automatic SQL code from the model defined in the architecture tool so sometimes you are getting weird results but are easily trackable (MSTR reports in all SQL generated code) to be fixed.
No ETL comes with the tool, either you have your own solution (MSTR SSIS, Informatica) to model your DWH or you connect MSTR to the datasource / transactional (which is not good)
I think that MicroStrategy has a lot of well-designed features, and that if users know how to use them or are willing to learn, it maybe a very valuable tools for them. I can recall that most users love to use the MicroStrategy Visual Insight tool that allows users to see in-real time graphs that users design on-site, using the attributes and metrics that they are familiar with.
Another good example, is the intelligence cube and incremental refresh reports that allow developers to update or create a report with a great quantity of information and store it on memory. This only takes a few seconds to show users the full results instead of always querying the data warehouse for the same results over and over. In addition, developers can schedule an incremental refresh of data on days, weeks, months, or whatever filter they desire, without the user feeling such work being done.
Update: MicroStrategy Mobile application is considered to be one of the best, for almost 4 or 5 years. I have used multiple times and I have to say, it is a great tool. Easy to configure and easy to adapt the reports to Mobile users, specially if they have an Iphone, since in the 9.4 version it was well prepared for Iphone users. Aside from that, Documents can be made to take pixel % in account, so you can make a report in the Developer, that suits both mobile and web users in a unique report.
Using the intelligence cube, I’ve managed to increase the performance of the main load of my documents, giving users the full data access in less than five seconds, instead of spending 30 seconds or a minute waiting for the results.
Update: Using the mobile application, it gave insurer agents more flexibility and a great success in their daily roles, since they could insert new information directly from MicroStrategy Mobile (using Transaction Services) and the colleagues at the company could respond within minutes or hours, saving the problem that is the trip.
I think that there are some bugs regarding the design, and some features are a little hidden from the developer. Developers need to do a lot of research and consult a lot of manuals just to find that the solution for their problem was in a check-box within the configurations of the tool or project.
Update: Never tried the MicroStrategy 10, only installed it, so the improvement may already been answered in a lot of features.
Update: I’ve used this solution for about 1 - 1,5 years, but not constantly.
The installation was well explained in the manuals, and the deployment of hotfixes and patches are as easy as a normal computer program installation.
Update: MicroStrategy version 10 (and beta) is similar to version 9.4 in installation and configuration.
The only issue that I can think of, is that from time to time my web server stops and I have to restart the web server. I do not know why this happens, but we’ve created a process that every minute there are checks the status of the web server, and restarts it if necessary. It may be a problem with the tool or a problem with the infrastructure at the client's company.
Update: Turns out, the client infrastructure may be blocking the Web Server from running all the time. Comparing the installation done in a Virtual Machine and another one in another client, they haven't got any type of web server related problems and the first one has, which makes me think its a infrastructure configuration that from time to time, blocks the service.
No issues encountered.
I've never used it, but I only have good things to say about the users of the MicroStrategy Community. They always give good ideas, a lot of workarounds and 90% of the time, they respond within the day with a lot of links to technical notes and others posts among others.
Update: Initial setup was really straightforward, in my opinion.
I've done the installation, configuration and designed the entire project (Logical Architecture, Reporting/Dashboarding, Mobile application, among others)
The best thing I saw was the excellent mobile integration. The interface is very clean and beautiful. The configuration of devices is extremely fast, you just need to click the link that is sent to you with all the configuration.
Another great feature of MicroStrategy is the SDK, with which you can introduce new charts and customize the whole web environment. You can customize almost everything in MicroStrategy. Finally, the MicroStrategy Community is very active, you can have answers faster than the support sometimes.
We provided dynamic reports, using data from a large database. The ability to use in-memory calculations in association with the calculations performed in the queries, made possible to run heavy queries faster, because the the heaviest calculations were performed by the analytical engine. So the query passed less time at the RDBMS.
In another situation, we were supposed to configure MicroStrategy Mobile on many devices. To do this, we made a list of the users, told them to download and install the app, and then we sent them the link to configure the application. In a few minutes, almost every device was configured and running.
The main thing that the company must improve is the support for their clients.
In Brazil I have seen many issues not being resolved for a long time, which makes the clients become impacient and disappointed.
I´ve been working with different versions of MicroStrategy since 2011, for different customers such as government agencies, banks and insurance companies.
A common issue during deployment in Windows was that, the registries were not being well configured, then the developer (Desktop) tool stopped running. To fix this issue you need to reinstall the tool.
There are also problems after installing MicroStrategy Web at IIS, and you need to go to the registries and change a specific path to the JNI Bridge.
No issues encountered.
No issues encountered, and when we needed to upgrade a machine, we just had to change the memory configuration to use the new memory that was available.
In some cases MicroStrategy took too long to respond the opened cases, what made the clients very upset and disappointed.
I believe the customer service needs to improve. It can be better.
The manuals of the tool are very complete, if you follow that, you are not going to have many problems.
MicroStrategy need to create cheaper solutions, as nowadays it's too expensive, and sometimes you pay for something that you are not going to really use.
v10 of MicroStrategy is helping a lot of users by giving them the possibility to add new charts using JavaScript libraries like D3, in a very simple way using Visual Insight.
HTML5 is supported everywhere, so using it will be a game changer.
You must practice! The amount of configurations and possibilities are huge, so, go through the manuals, go through the online courses, participate in the community. There are a lot of things to learn.
The features I loved is the easy way the software allows you to design your own dashboard and the professional way it displays it. One would think that I was a graphic designer every time I create a dashboard (which I am not).
The import of excel files into Microstrategy and the ease of data manipulation is outstanding.
Good job Microstategy!
The results are not in yet as it is too early to tell.
Data dictionary import would be great.
MicroStrategy can read data from a wide variety of different DBMS and web services, producing optimized SQL code for each of them. It's a one stop solution for BI: after 10 years using it I still haven't found a report or graph that can't be done with the suite.
We use it for any kind of reporting and analysis. It helped manage the institution, reduce costs and provide better service to the patients (which are our customers...)
The web is full of very interesting data, and the number of web services providing datasets is increasing. I would like to see Support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 to be able to attach external data sources. I'd like to have Support for JSON data. I hope HTML5 and JavaScript will be used extensively in next versions, to substitute the Flash based components.
Since 2003
The software is feature rich and clearly not easy to start with. I believe the installation and the setup of the data model is the most difficult part; once this is done, the rest of the deployment is very easy. Clients run on Windows, on Android and on iOS seamlessly, there is a web based interface that can be used from most browsers.
No. I have been using the software both on Windows and on headless Linux, and had no stability issues fo far. Memory availability is very important, as in any other data intensive software.
We don't have Petabytes scale databases. Our information systems are in the Gigabytes order of magnitude. We were able to handle our data volume with ease. Number of concurrent users is in the hundreds, no problems so far.
We solve most of the issues with the knowledge base or the discussion forums. To date we had no interaction with the customer service apart from some help we needed for upgrading from version 7 to version 9.
Technical Support:The knowledge base is extensive and covers 90% of the problems we may face. For the rest, we manage to find alternatives thanks to networking, blogs, forums, etc.
We are still using multi vendors solutions. There are historical datawarehouses that need to be maintained (Oracle BI, Actuate, Microsoft BI), but all new development is done with MicroStrategy. Reason for that is mainly practical and economical. We prefer paying licenses to one signle vendor whenever posible. We are also testing the new free Desktop version for a reduced number of users.
The setup is complex. After the installation you need to configure several aspect of the suite: metadata, connections, Project settings and start developing objects. I suggest buying a book or reading the manual thoroughly. There is a very good book on Amazon "Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy" that covers every aspect of the setup and initial phases of the Project (http://amzn.to/1by3HAO).
We implement everything in house due to the sensitivity of data.
I'd rather not disclose it.
We evaluated Oracle, QlickView, Tableau, Microsoft BI
Training training training. Especially in the beginning phase, a wrong choice can be very costly.
You can use MSTR as an ETL tool though - when you import data you have data wrangling option where you can apply many functions as well as creation of new columns. Also MSTR enables you to connect to the files and with datamart functionality or transaction functionality and ffsql you can write it back to DB. Its far from being Informatica yet there are some options how to handle this...