MicroStrategy World 2012 - Day 2 Recap

For starters, I'm sorry for the dramatic drop off in Twitter activity from yesterday for those trying to follow along at home.  WiFi and 3G connectivity was very spotty all day, and I gave up early.  Nevertheless, I kept my notes, and the following are my impressions and experiences from Day 2.

MicroStrategy World 2012 - Day 1 Recap

Here's a quick recap of the first day, which included the opening Keynote by MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor and the first 3 sessions.  If you didn't follow along live on Twitter, I encourage you to roll back through the timeline for the #mstrworld hashtag from 9:30am forward.  There were some great comments and points.  I don't have time to pick them out now, but I'll try to come back and link some of my favorites later on.

MicroStrategy World 2012 Coverage

MicroStrategy World 2012 kicks off Monday, and as you may know, I'm excited.

Using ApplyComparison for Flexible Filtering

MicroStrategy's strongest feature is it's SQL Engine.  The ability to define object relationships and then allow MicroStrategy to generate all of the appropriate SQL as you manipulate and drill is the core of the product.  But of course, it can't handle every since situation and you may sometimes need to help it along in certain instances.  To extend this flexibility to you, MicroStrategy offers 5 functions which allow you to directly supply the SQL you want for a specific piece of the Query: ApplySimple, ApplyAgg, ApplyComparison, ApplyOLAP and ApplyLogical.  Today, I'll talk about ApplyComparison, which allows you to provide custom SQL in the WHERE clause of the query.

Web Server Macro

A common environment setup is to have separate machines for your Production and Development environments.  While a lot of shops I've worked in will simply have separate Production and Development projects on the same physical servers (usually due to budget reasons), having separate physical machines gives you advantages like being able to restart the IServer / Web Server without causing outages for users.  Sometimes though, this can cause trouble with certain types of Document features.  Specifically, if you're using links to images or other reports that require the full URL (for example, to support links in a Subscription or Export or Images hosted on a 3rd party server), you could run into trouble if you're using different Web Servers for Production and Development.  While it would be a hassle to modify these options on each affected Document during testing and Migration, MicroStrategy offers a handy feature to make it much easier to maintain.

Custom Formatting Strings

Formatting metrics is something that we're all familiar with.  Currency, commas, decimal places and percents are common choices, but what happens when we have to do something more advanced?  The Number Formatting screen for a Metric contains an option to provide a Custom Formatting string, but documentation is sparse on this hidden gem of a feature.  Today, I'll talk a little bit about how it works and provide some useful links for crafting your own formatting magic.

Saving Settings in Custom Visualizations

I had an interesting problem the other day while working on a custom visualization.  The requirement was for the user to be able to enter some custom text into a box to annotate some data, but the end usage was to export this to interactive PDF.  This meant that upon export, any text entered would be lost, so I needed a way to persist that data through the export.  Fortunately, Widget Properties will persist as defaults to the exported PDF, but it's not a very good UI for the user to have to go to the property screen to enter some text that should just be editable directly on the Dashboard.  Fortunately, I discovered a way to save data to the property storage from outside of the property window and without adding any new GUI elements to the property window.  This turned out to save the day for my project!

Web Styles for Prompts

One feature that I find is often overlooked is the ability to change the display style of Prompts in Web.  In a lot of situations, these alternate styles can help guide the user in the way the prompt should be answered (one selection vs many selections) in a way that's not always as clear or clean as the default Shopping Cart style.  It's a quick option to modify and a few handy out of the box options and can add some style and familiarity to your Reports for end users.

Blog Stats

This is my 100th post, and my last for the year.  I figured it would be fun to share some statistics about the blog and what better way to do that than with MicroStrategy Cloud Personal.  I use Google Blogger as the backend software for my blog, and it keeps some pretty high level statistics for me.  In mid-October, they offered integration with Google Analytics that gives me much more details.  I took some Google Analytics data from the Month of November and created a Dashboard that you can view here.

VLDB Properties

Today's post is at the request of @jayzzzz on Twitter.

VLDB (Very Large Database) Properties are settings that allow you to tweak some of the detailed behavior of MicroStrategy.  These settings control options on how the SQL Engine and Analytical Engine behave, and are necessary to address in every environment.  Precise control of these options can have dramatic effects on the performance of your reports, so today I'll talk a little bit about how they work, where you can set them, and some of my favorite settings to tweak.