MicroStrategy Interview Questions and Answers

MicroStrategy is a Business Intelligence software, which offers a wide range of data analytics capabilities. MicroStrategy platform supports interactive dashboards, scorecards, highly formatted reports, ad hoc query, thresholds and alerts, and automated report distribution. Interfaces include web, desktop (for developers) and Microsoft Office integration. MicroStrategy Mobile also supports mobile BI. It provides enterprise software for business intelligence, mobile intelligence and network applications.

MicroStrategy is an enterprise business intelligence (BI) application software vendor. Turning data into reports and dashboards that is what every BI product has to do, but MicroStrategy Business Intelligence goes a step further. It really turns data into better and more reliable decisions which boost the performance of the organization. The MicroStrategy platform supports interactive dashboards, scorecards, highly formatted reports, ad hoc query, thresholds and alerts, and automated report distribution. MicroStrategy Business Intelligence suite is provided with in-memory BI acceleration technology so that all the tasks can be done significantly faster. Automated maintenance, immediate application development and deployment, multidimensional data sources support, quick start up of new applications, and expanded geo-mapping capabilities – these are the features which MicroStrategy Business Intelligence suite distinguishes itself from its previous releases and other vendors’ solutions as well.

MicroStrategy’s relational OLAP (ROLAP) architecture allows users to “drill anywhere” in the entire relational database, all the way down to transactional-level detail. MicroStrategy has optimizations for all major relational database and data warehouse vendors and can also access multidimensional databases and flat files.

MicroStrategy has a flexible platform that offers the following features:

• High-performance business intelligence
• Cloud
• MetaData Repository
• Enterprise Assets
• Analytical Tools
• Family of Clients
• Enterprise Analytics
• Easy to use and maintain
• Self-service analytics
• Big data solutions
• Software as a service (SaaS)
• Real-time WYSIWYG report design
• Scorecards and dashboards
• Agile analytics
• Data Modeling
• Mobile
• Services: MicroStrategy offers a comprehensive set of business intelligence services like Alerting, Reporting, Logical and Physical Access etc., that can be delivered via the on premise MicroStrategy Server or the MicroStrategy Cloud. These services dynamically assemble metadata objects and provide core analytical processing power for any type of analytics application.
• New: The newest generation of our free data discovery tool delivers a completely redesigned interface and significantly enhances the previous version of Desktop. With its ability to author, promote, and certify dossiers, it is now possible for teams to unleash agility while maintaining IT governance. It’s never been easier to deploy governed data discovery throughout the enterprise.

Cache contains the properties and data of a report once a report has been run. Caches can be stored in memory and/or on disk. When users ask for a report that is cached, the Intelligence Server will retrieve the data from disk or memory instead of running a query on the data source. Cache creation and usage securely leverages other users’ work, increases query performance and reduces the workload on the data warehouse

Intelligent Cubes are in-memory caches stored by the Intelligence Server. While accessing an Intelligent Cube, users can easily add or remove report objects (such as attributes and metrics), add new metric calculations and filter their view of the data — all in an ad hoc fashion with speed-of-thought response times. Data stored outside an Intelligent Cube is automatically accessed using the ROLAP engine when drilling to more details

Metadata is repository which stores MicroStrategy objects definitions and information about the data warehouse structure and content. Metadata is used by the intelligence server to evaluate the most efficient data retrieval scenario to guarantee optimal query performance. 2-tier and 3-tier Architecture in MSTR

MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server is a software product that monitors and delivers individualized information to users via email, web portals, and wireless devices such as PDAs, pagers, and phones. Through a easy-to-use web page, users specify what information they want, when and how they want to receive it.

OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) is the technology behind many Business Intelligence (BI) applications. OLAP is a powerful technology for data discovery, including capabilities for limitless report viewing, complex analytical calculations, and predictive “what if” scenario (budget, forecast) planning. OLAP performs multidimensional analysis of business data and provides the capability for complex calculations, trend analysis, and sophisticated data modeling. It is the foundation for many kinds of business applications for Business Performance Management, Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, Financial Reporting, Analysis, Simulation Models, Knowledge Discovery, and Data Warehouse Reporting. OLAP enables end-users to perform ad hoc analysis of data in multiple dimensions, thereby providing the insight and understanding they need for better decision making.

Users have the ability to drill within the document, drill anywhere, or disable drilling. Drilling capabilities can be applied to a grid or graph, enabling users to perform an investigative analysis directly on a dashboard, scorecard, or enterprise report. Users can drill out of the dashboard to investigate across the data warehouse or multiple data sources and generate new information-rich reports. Using the multi-select feature, business users can dynamically select any group of elements and create derived element groups on the fly. Elements can be removed or added dynamically and users can create their own calculations between various groups or individual items

MicroStrategy OLAP Services is an extension to MicroStrategy Intelligence Server that allows MicroStrategy Web and Desktop users to manipulate Intelligent Cubes™. With OLAP Services end users can add or remove report objects, add derived metrics and modify the filter — all with speed-of-thought response time against Intelligent Cubes. OLAP Services enables full multi-dimensional OLAP analysis within Intelligent Cubes,

With OLAP Services Microstrategy Web, Desktop and Office users can:

• Create unique report views based off an Intelligent Cube. With OLAP Services, users can create unique report views by adding or removing attributes and metrics contained within the Intelligent Cube. This allows speed-of-thought report creation and modification with no need to extract data from the data warehouse.
• Create new on-the-fly metric calculations from existing metrics in an Intelligent Cube. The new calculation is performed without submitting a new request to the data warehouse.
• Filter their view of the data within an Intelligent Cube. The filtering will be performed on MicroStrategy Intelligence Server within the Intelligent Cube.

Intelligent Cubes are user or administrator created multi-dimensional cubes that operate within MicroStrategy Intelligence Server™. On MicroStrategy’s BI platform, creating an Intelligent Cube is as easy as creating a report. Intelligent Cubes enable Microstrategy to combine the speed and interactivity of multi-dimensional OLAP analysis and the analytical power and depth of relational OLAP.

Tracing is available under the Tools/Diagnostics menu. These tracing options apply to every MicroStrategy product installed on the machine. To see the SQL that has been executed against the metadata, go to the advanced tab and turn on ‘SQL Tracing’ under the DSS Server key. Function level tracing can be accomplished by going to the advanced tab and turning on ‘Function Level Tracing’ under the DSS Object Manager key.

 A user defines two attributes that have the same definition but play different roles in the business model. In this example, attribute Origin Airport and Destination Airport are defined using the same Lookup Table and Column (Airport_ID). Both attributes share the same forms, or information about them (Description, Location, etc.). In the fact table, however, a separate column exists for each of their roles (Origin_Airport_ID and Destination_Airport_ID).

The MicroStrategy Web application is designed so that each MicroStrategy Web cluster node does not need to know that it is a member of a cluster. MicroStrategy Web is designed to be stateless, so that each client http request can be processed individually without having to persist information within the MicroStrategy Web application. Therefore, third-party Web-server clustering software can be used to cluster together multiple web servers running MicroStrategy Web

Users have the ability to maintain separate documents and combine them into a single, finalized document (report book, statement, or dashboard book). The individual documents can be maintained by different users and they can have the following unique qualities:

• Page groupings
• Layout
• Page Orientation
• Vertical or horizontal repeating sections
• Conditional formatting
• Pagination
• Datasets
• Enabling users to group together multiple documents into one makes it significantly easier to develop and maintain individual pieces of the unified document

Report filters: report filters are the conditions that accompany the report generating SQL statements. The report definitions have the filters as part of their definition.

View Filters: View Filters are the conditions that come into play before a specific result is presented to the user. Thus the view filters are not part of the SQL statements like report definitions, rather they are the filters applied after the execution of the SQL statements, after the data is retrieved from the data warehouse.

Whenever a MicroStrategy Intelligence Server cluster node is stopped in any way besides explicitly shutting down the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server service, the node will automatically rejoin the cluster when the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server service is restarted. So, if the node crashes, then the node will rejoin the cluster automatically upon startup.

To prevent the loss of a MicroStrategy Intelligence Server cluster node from affecting report cache availability, the cluster can be configured such that a separate file server is used as a common report cache repository. In order to maintain cache availability, this separate file server can be configured for failover with third-party clustering software.

A custom group is a set of special filters that can be placed on a template. It is made up of an ordered collection of elements called custom group elements. Consolidations are used to specify the data you want to view in your report. They allow you to group attribute elements in new ways without changing the metadata and warehouse definitions.

MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server supports: enterprise reporting applications, executive information portals, corporate information dissemination, sale force automation, working capital management, supply chain management, extranet portals, secure business to business portals, customer service applications, and intelligent alerting applications

MicroStrategy Command Manager lets you perform various administrative and application development tasks by using text commands that can be saved as scripts. Like for example: – server management, user management, security, database management.

Cross-Joins can be prevented by setting the VLDB property that does not allow to execute a cross-join

DataMart’s to create aggregate/summary tables at higher levels of a hierarchies. Addition of Indexes to tables for faster execution of queries. Factors to decide on aggregate tables if a large set of reports need to be viewed at a level (a level that is higher than that of the existing Fact tables used by those reports) then it is worth creating aggregate tables at that level. Or if a report is huge and it is critical for the business decisions then it is worth creating the aggregate tables for that report

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server users can easily perform simple to sophisticated analysis such as basic performance indicators, market basket, churn, retention and decile analysis. Users can make use of a complete library of statistical, mathematical, financial and OLAP functions. Other types of analysis include hypothesis testing, regressions, neural networks, and decision tress, clustering and bond calculations

Microstrategy Desktop is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Korean, Italian, Swedish, Japanese and Portuguese.

Level metrics are advanced metrics which are set to be evaluated at a specified attribute level. These are required when in the same report you need to roll up a metric at two different levels side by side. Example is comparison of “Revenue from a Region” to “Revenue from a Country”. Here Region and Country are the two different levels.

Microstrategy Desktop™ is a Windows client-server software application that provides integrated monitoring, reporting, and analysis capabilities.

It is a database object that contains the results of a query. They are local copies of data located remotely or are used to create summary tables based on aggregations of a table’s data. Materialized views, which store data based on remote tables are also, known as snapshots. A materialized view caches the query result as a concrete table that may be updated from the original base tables from time to time. Materialized views were implemented first by the Oracle database. In IBM DB2, they are called “materialized query tables”; Microsoft SQL Server has a similar feature called “indexed view”.

MicroStrategy offers out-of-the box templates that provide a great starting point for dashboard designers. Each template contains a series of containers, or panel stacks, that enable users to quickly add components to each panel stack, such as: text boxes, shapes, reports, grids, graphs, panel stacks, HTML containers, selectors, and widgets. Also, pre-formatted customized templates can be created to place the design experience in the hands of end-users. These pre-formatted templates can include the corporate logo and color layout. Users can simply drag, drop, and select dashboard components to quickly design a dashboard in the matter of minutes.

Yes. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server uses XML to transfer data. This enables organizations to present information from Intelligence Server to end users through multiple mediums including the Web, email and web services

Yes. This new Dynamic MDX Engine generates optimized MDX syntax that is fully certified with SAP BW using SAP’s high-performance BAPI interfaces.

The Conflict Resolution window provides the user with a means to decide how to handle object conflicts between the source project and the destination project. In addition, the Conflict Resolution window displays the object name in the original project, the object name in the destination project and the type of conflict. Users may also specify a new name for the object depending on the action chosen.

Yes. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server’s centralized architecture provides one console from which all maintenance and administration can be performed. In addition, a standardized data dictionary for enterprise reporting and OLAP analysis is stored in a metadata repository and enables reusable reporting objects and business rules.

A BI application can access much greater memory resources when running on a 64-bit system than it could on a 32-bit system. More addressable memory results in more BI applications, more sophisticated applications, more reports, larger reports, better performance and more users — all with fewer servers. Organizations can combine MicroStrategy’s industry leading scalability with the advantages of 64-bit UNIX to deploy the richest BI applications, with the highest performance and the most users

Object Manager can move just a few objects or just the objects in a few folders. Project Merge moves all the objects in a project.

Object Manager must locate the dependents of the copied objects and then determine their differences before performing the copy operation. Project Merge does not do a dependency search, since all the objects in the project are to be copied.

Project Merge can be run from the command prompt in Microsoft Windows.”]

MicroStrategy Object Manager makes a list of all object dependencies before copying an object to prevent metadata inconsistency. The time required for dependency checking varies based on a customer’s metadata size and schema complexity. For large metadata and complex schemas, gathering all the dependencies may take a long time.

The Very Large Data Base (VLDB) properties is the configuration set that manages the overall way in which the database behaves and generates reports. There are many such settings like check for cross joins, intermediate table creation and type etc. The VLDB properties can be set at many different levels like metric level, attribute level, Database Instance level, project level or the DBMS level. The highest precedence is given to the report level of configurations.

The level metrics are the metric calculation that are carried out over the specific attribute but at the different levels or dimensions. For example, the number of units sold is an attribute that we keep a count on. That metric can be calculated across time and region. Say number of units sold in last month and the number of units sold in specific region of the country. Here the region and time are two different levels. Such level-based metric give analytical inference as to the performance of the organization etc.

The command manger is the one through which you can manage the applications, user accesses, security and databases of the MicroStrategy. The command manager allows us to save the text commands that can be executed as scripts. Thus it can help in automation of the entire management process.

Users can receive both tables and charts from the MicroStrategy platform, and content from current information sources such as transaction processing systems, Enterprise Resource Planning systems, databases, XML files, and web servers

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server provides a highly robust security model at four different layers in your system:

User level: Login and ID authentication ensure users have authorization to access the MicroStrategy system.

Application level: Access control lists and user privileges ensure proper access to MicroStrategy objects and functionality.

Data transmission level: Encryption and dual firewall configuration ensure safe transmission of data.

Data level: Security filters ensure users access only the data they have authorization to view.

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server provides one centralized architecture for all users’ monitoring, reporting and analysis requirements. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server also provides scalability to analyze any amount of data, support for any number of users and a 24 X 7 operating environment, with robust security.

The pass-through functions are the specific database-oriented SQL statements and constructs that are executed by the MicroStrategy without checking semantics of the actual construct. They are called pass-through as they are not checked for correctness by the MicroStrategy as such. Apply Simple, apply comparison are two pass through functions that MicroStrategy usually applies.

The custom groups are the made up of what are called as custom group elements and together they act as a special filter that can be implemented over a specific template. Consolidations refer to the way in which you group or order the data in your report. The different attributes can be gathered together without changing the underlying metadata and ware housing structure

There are many aspects of the report that can be put into testing depending upon the type of report.

• Naming convention tests.
• Total calculations test.
• SQL query validations.
• Attribute and metric positions in report.
• Drilling options Tests.
• Prompts related verifications.
• Security filter tests.
• Formatting/export functionality tests.
• Threshold testing

Different types of prompts are:

Level prompts: It allows you to determine the level of aggregation calculation of a metrics

Object prompts: It allows you to select objects comprising a report at run-time

Value prompts: It allows users to type a value.  It is used in conjunction with metrics or other prompt for filters

Filter definition Prompt: This type of prompt enables users to decide how the report’s data is filtered, based on lists of attribute elements, attributes in a hierarchy or metrics.

Statistics tables contain data on the MicroStrategy system’s usage and performance and are populated by all projects that are configured to log statistics.

To configure: –

• Set up the Enterprise Manager.
• Define the statistics and enterprise warehouse database.
• Create the statistics database instance
• Go the project configuration wizard of the project
• Select statistics and define the you want to log

In MicroStrategy, logical view is a table that you create by writing the SQL in MicroStrategy instead of pulling it out from warehouse catalog.

Smart metric is referred when a compound metric is defined with other metric objects using arithmetic operations like sum M1/M2.

In MicroStrategy security can be incorporated using a mix of any of the following ways:

• Putting user specific restrictions at the database end and using user specific connection mapping. This is for column level security.
• Applying folder and object level security to restrict access to certain set of reports/objects
• Applying Security filters to the user. This provides row level security.

Microstrategy Desktop provides a host of security options to ensure that data is kept confidential and private. To facilitate easy deployment and minimal maintenance, Microstrategy Desktop integrates with Windows NT and 2000 security and with Novell directory. As a result, users who have logged into these systems will not need to log on again.

Security in MicroStrategy Object Manager is based on the MicroStrategy 7.x Product Suite security model. All activities that can be performed in MicroStrategy Object Manager are governed by privileges and access control lists. For example, if a user is not allowed to access a certain folder in MicroStrategy Agent, they will not be able to access the folder in MicroStrategy Object Manager.

Intelligent Cubes used by OLAP Services automatically inherit all of the security provisions of every report object used within the Intelligent Cube, and those provisions are dynamically applied to each user’s security profile when the cube is accessed. If a user only has privileges to use four of the five metrics contained in an Intelligent Cube, that restriction will automatically and seamlessly apply when the user accesses the Intelligent Cube. The user will still have access to the Intelligent Cube for the four metrics he or she has privileges to use.