Although Santa Claus maybe a myth to some of you, let me assure you narrowcast segmentation does work. I have successfully deployed it on many flash dashboards and large excel reports. In fact, I recently recommended using segmentation for large dashboards in “10 Strategies to Improve your Flash Dashboards Performance.” Read more…
A friend sent this video to me several months ago before SAP purchased BO. If you didnt see it already its too late, you missed a clever rendition of Sir Mix A Lot’s “Baby Got Back”. I guess the lighthearted references to big butts didnt sit well with SAP’s executive management. IMHO, this was a short-sighted move. Baby Got BI had all the trappings of a viral marketing video and was on the verge of mass saturation. In fact, it was my colleague at MicroStrategy who forwarded this to me. When you got competitors watching a fun video sort of praising your product, its a good thing.
The real question is: Where is the MicroStrategy response video? lol
As promised this is my agenda for the conference:
World 2009 Agenda
I really wanted to take the MCEP recertification but could not find the download for non-pep members. If anyone knows how to get registered for this please let me know.
Mystery: 64-bit Linux Intelligent Servers behind the firewall crashes every 4 days. Their counterparts outside the firewall is as stable as, hmm…gmail i guess.
“Hello techsupport, our server keep crashing and the users are screaming.” Then TS responds with the usual “Send the DSSErrors logs, the webserver logs, the core dump, the os logs, the metadata, the warehouse…foget it just send the whole damn box!” … “beep, beep. If you want to make a call please hang up and try again.” Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit here, lol. Read more…
In general, I have seen that people have this perception that the number of rows received in a report is the only reason for memory errors in an I-sever. It is not entirely true. A report with 10,000 rows can have memory errors while a report with 1 million rows can execute fine. Whats going on here? Read more…
As a former microstrategy production consultant I have been to world several times, but we were not allowed to participate in the customer events. This year I am especially excited since for the first time I can enjoy the whole event. I’m looking forward to gaining insight into other people’s real world implementation experiences and taking tracks on Predictive Data Mining. Of course, the party at Pure will be kick-ass. MicroStrategy knows how to party. Its one of the things I missed after leaving the company. Read more…
In general, practitioners of MicroStrategy follow the standard development model of maintaining separate dev, uat, and prod instances (development, user acceptance testing, and production respectively). This is the approach recommended by MicroStrategy which IT departments apply broadly to their own detriment. Here’s a bold claim and a number pulled out of thin air: 70% of UAT projects serves no real purpose as a standalone project. I haven’t conducted a study or anything (not yet at least) so I don’t know if it’s really 70%, but I have worked in many such environments. Read more…
Flash is all the rage in the microstrategy community these days. It’s a far better way to visualize multiple datasets compared to the old static pdf/html report services documents. MicroStrategy flash dashboards have allowed users to pivot, filter,and drill on many metrics simultaneously in the same view. Coupled with this enhanced level of interactivity are really clean and pretty visualizations. All of this is quite compelling and validated by the general adoption of flash/flex in BI. Unfortunately, there is a trend out there that’s pushing the dashboard beyond its original definition and intended capabilities. Instead of simply viewing high level aggregated results, users are demanding detailed tabular data in the same space. Read more…
So you set all the metrics to outer join in the report data options, however your only able to get it to do a left outer join. Recently, I ran into such a situation and realized I wasn’t clear on why the sql engine does left outer joins in some cases and full outer joins in other. After some digging around and testing it seems that (rightly so) full outer joins are only applied to intermediate tables with the same join keys. Read more…
Out of the box MicroStrategy supports passing parameters in the url to automatically answer prompts. This is a pretty cool feature when drilling from dashboards, or linking to reports from portals or whatever. However, if your warehouse performance is unpredictable or just plain slow prompted reports maybe a bad idea. Read more…