One of the eagerly anticipated features added to 9.2 was the addition of an out of the box Google Map Widget. Well, not technically out of the box, but at least a provided plugin with easy to follow instructions for setting it up. While the steps seem straight forward, I often see a lot of questions surrounding it. There’s also a surprise waiting for you...
I’ve noticed that in my experience, most users log into a single project. Either because there’s only one project in the environment, or because the projects are specific to their department or function and it’s the only one they have access to. With that, it’s always slightly annoyed me that a user has to login and then click to access the single project they have....
While testing my 9.2.1 upgrade, I encountered quite a surprise. It seems that in their continued effort to increase the performance of the metadata, MicroStrategy changed the way they store Object IDs, at least in SQL Server 2008. Instead of storing the values as varchar(32), they are now stored as UniqueIdentifier. Before you panic about your Reports and Documents with hardcoded Object ID links, they...
One thing that can quickly happen to any environment is Report Sprawl, which is where many variations of similar reports can clog up folders and make it hard for a user to find exactly what they need. To a certain degree, the Search functionality can assist this, but that’s largely hoping that the user both knows what term to search for, and that the developer...
MicroStrategy released the latest update to their product suite, version 9.2.1. This is a Service Pack release to the 9.2 platform and contains lots of fixes, but also a few new key features and rounds off the major announcements they made at MicroStrategy World 2011. Today, I’ll highlight the big new features, and a few gems I’ve found along the way. Transaction ServicesThis is the...
There are lots of interesting functions in MicroStrategy’s Analytical Engine, but every once in awhile I stumble across one that really saves my day (though often long after the day needed saving). I work with a Type 2 Model aka. Slowly Changing Dimensions aka. As-is vs As-was, and unfortunately it can cause a lot of hoops for me to jump through. In this model, we...
Last month, I posted about some exciting new features in Flash Builder 4.5 that allowed us to port existing Flash visualizations directly to the iPad without any major code modifications. One of the issues I previously hadn’t worked out (and admittedly, the most important feature) was the ability for the iPad version of the visualization to pull data directly from MicroStrategy at runtime. I’m happy...
The most obvious reason to maintain multiple environments (Development, Test, Production) is so that you can make changes to objects while building/modifying without impacting Production. Once the changes are complete/tested, they can be migrated with MicroStrategy Object Manager into the target project. In order for this theme to work, MicroStrategy relies on the Object IDs to be synced for objects between projects. So what do...
A handy little feature available in the MicroStrategy Warehouse Catalog is the ability to add a prefix to a table. This can be done either manually or automatically and gives you a little bit of flexibility in your database schema as well as opening a few tricks for you. While it’s not necessary in every situation, it does come in handy in a pinch and...
One of the nicest features of the MicroStrategy Visualization Framework is that widget default properties are stored in the metadata along with the report. The framework comes with a very easy to use Properties editor automatically saves the current settings with the report when it’s saved. This allows you to use the widget in multiple locations, provide flexible configurations that users can change, but also...
