8 reasons why you should upgrade to MicroStrategy 10

By -
Flash is dead

As you probably may know, Flash is no longer the favorite technology to build the web and it's losing ground more and more to the point where Google no longer wants to support it.  MicroStrategy made the necessary changes and moved everything to HTML5 and JS. This also increases the compatibility across platforms/devices, making deployment a lot easier.


Redesigned Visual Insight

There's no doubt that Dashboard/VI is the de facto standard in MicroStrategy analytics. VI is also the main vessel for data discovery and self-service BI. Documents are old flavored, non-responsive which take long time to build. Some would also argue that documents will be deprecated in a future release of MicroStrategy.


Easier upgrades

MicroStrategy has made things easier for deployments and upgrades, allowing installations over an older version of the platform without removing it first. This reduces considerably the necessary time to deploy a new version. Moreover, the configurations done in the older version will be preserved (metadata upgrade is still necessary).


Improved performance

MicroStrategy states that the engine has been redesigned and we've seen improvements of the data fetching from the data sources. Statistics gathered on our environment have shown that some reports reduced their processing time by 60% (compared to 9.4.1) due to better data fetching techniques. These reports were tested between V9 and V10 pointing to the same data source using cold caches.


Scalable cubes

Facebook has put its mark on the product by collaborating with MicroStrategy for a new feature called PRIME cubes. This technology allows the cubes to be partitioned across a pre-defined attribute, each partition being able to store up to 2 billion rows. The partitions will be then processed in parallel for reduced population times.

For more details on PRIME cubes, check the following link: https://goo.gl/v309Bz


Recover your work

What happens if you reach session timeout and you forgot to save? No worries, in version 10 you will be able to recover it from the main menu of the project's home page.


Custom visualizations

MicroStrategy introduced a new custom visualization library which require only drag-and-drop to deploy. They really bring some fresh air to the dashboard's overall feel.


Import Data & Wrangling


Let's face it the import data feature has totally changed in version 10. You can bring data from many source out of the box and they added a wrangling functionality which allow you to prepare the data before you analyze it. Similar idea as Tableau, but with a nice task history option and a save functionality to re-use the wrangling script.

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 4, 2018 at 7:17 AM

    Excellent article. Very interesting to read. I really love to read such a nice article. Thanks! keep rocking.Microstrategy Online course Hyderabad

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The count distinct adventure - Part I

By -
Image
I've been working with several reporting and data analysis tools for a while now. Started with SSAS cubes, then Business Objects came along, later, MicroStrategy (MSTR) joined the team and then Tableau. They all have their own ways of managing count distinct (CD), but they yet have more in common. Manage simply means yielding the good results every time a user interacts with that CD measure. Us, the BI tech guys, we have a goal to facilitate easy data analysis to the users, especially that most of them work in non-IT domains and have different skill levels. Throughout time, CDs have proved to be a difficult thing to manage and if it wasn't the ease of implementation, it was the performance impact we soon discovered. It's been known that the difficulty lies in the nature of this non-additive measure. Basically, we cannot sum it as a standard revenue measure, but you always have to re-calculate it when the level of the aggregation changes. Have to admit that I like a goo...
Read more

The surrogate key strikes back

By -
If you ever participated in building a data warehouse or worked around data warehouses, you've probably came across the surrogate key (SK) notion. If you’re not familiar, then take a look at this article on the Kimball's group website. Surrogate keys are very common in data warehouses and they bring a lot of functionality, from design to performance enhancements. Now, one of the surrogate key's drawbacks is the difficulty to keep it in synch between all environments. As each environment can be linked to a different version of the source (e.g. UAT, live environments etc.), surrogate keys can get off for the same natural key and this can also have an effect in MicroStrategy. When building attributes you have to define its forms. The ID form should contain a unique key describing the attribute in order to provide correct joining, aggregation and attribute member list when applying filters. Indeed the surrogate key doesn’t have any business meaning, so this form w...
Read more

The count distinct adventure - Part II

By -
During the first part of the topic we introduced the challenge of count distinct and 2 solutions to address them, along with their advantages and disadvantages. The list of solutions continues in this final section and these, presented below, are also the solutions that we use across our projects where CDs are required. Solution 3 - Count Distinct derived metrics This functionality is probably the most known by the users and mostly used, as it offers flexibility and the necessary control without the intervention of the IT teams. Creating =derived metrics in reports, Vis and documents is a walk In the park, using the context menus. With the deployment of V10, things got even more flexible adding support for conditional derived metrics (IF and CASE) by using attributes directly. As you probably remember, or still use today, up until V10, building conditional derived metrics was a hustle, as only metrics could be used with IF and CASE statements. You would first create a MAX(<...
Read more