MicroStrategy is an enterprise business intelligence (BI) application software vendor. The 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.
The MicroStrategy platform uses a single common metadata for consistency and streamlined maintenance. MicroStrategy’s 64-bit architecture supports in-memory analytics with “Intelligent Cubes” (i.e. OLAP reports cached in memory as data sets). Metrics and attributes are created once and used across different types of reports. Changes are made in one place and all related reports are automatically updated. Similarly, security permissions are granted in one place, reducing administration costs.
About MicroStrategy objects:
Your MicroStrategy project consists of several different types of objects, including reports, documents, filters, prompts, and more. The information below explains what purpose each object serves, and describes how you can use the object to better analyze your organization's data.
Providing business context to a report: Attributes Attribute icon:
Attributes are the business concepts reflected in your stored business data in your data source. Attributes provide a context in which to report on and analyze business facts or calculations. While knowing your company’s total sales is useful, knowing where and when the sales took place provides the kind of analytical depth users require on a daily basis.
For example, you have a report containing the Month, Year, and Region attributes, as well as a Revenue metric. When executed, the report displays your company’s revenue for each region, during each month and year for which data is available. Because of the attributes on the report, a substantial amount of information is available, including which regions produced the least revenue and which years saw the highest growth in revenue. If you remove the attributes from the report, you can only find out how much revenue the company made in total.
Calculating data on a report: Metrics Metric icon:
Metrics are MicroStrategy objects that represent business measures and key performance indicators. From a practical perspective, metrics are the calculations performed on data stored in your database, the results of which are displayed on a report. Metrics are similar to formulas in spreadsheet software. It is not an overstatement to say that the focus of almost any report is its metrics. Most of the decisions you make about the other objects to include on a report depend on the metrics you use on the report. Questions such as ”What were the sales for the eastern region during the fourth quarter?” or ”Are inventory counts being consistently replenished at the beginning of each week?” can easily be answered by metrics.
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