MicroStrategy 9 Focuses on Workgroup BI to Enterprise BI
New products, architectural extensions help companies seamlessly can move small, individual applications into cohesive enterprise BI operation
MicroStrategy Incorporated has announced MicroStrategy 9, which the company says is its biggest release in almost a decade. The announcement includes new products and enhancements to its enterprise BI platform.
With MicroStrategy 9, companies can standardize their enterprise BI by moving from small-scale workgroup BI to mid-sized departmental BI to full-scale enterprise BI. The release features:
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Support for workgroup BI with technology that helps an enterprise deploy new BI workgroup applications faster and easier
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Self-service features that enable empower business users and departments to create BI applications
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Extend the scale, performance, and efficiency of high-end BI
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Seamless evolution from workgroup BI and departmental BI to enterprise BI
MicroStrategy says it will extend its BI platform with significant technical advances, including multi-source capability, in-memory capability, new personalized report distribution services, new reporting capabilities, new dashboard features, a streamlined user interface, and technical features that extend the performance and scalability of the platform.
ROLAP at the Forefront
MicroStrategy has added a new “multi-source engine” to its ROLAP architecture so enterprises can use the program’s unified, multi-dimensional model to access multiple database sources, such as data warehouses, data marts, operational databases, and departmental databases. (Previous versions were restricted to a single relational database.) Multi-source ROLAP models each instance of data within the MicroStrategy metadata model only once, regardless of the number of databases involved; the multi-source engine then chooses the data source that can best deliver the data for SQL passes transparently to the user.
ROLAP will also help departments connect their BI software to more databases without the cost and administration of physically moving the data into a data warehouse. Departments can reduce the time to move data by weeks or months and the technical work can be accomplished by BI architects without requiring technical assistance from DBAs or ETL engineers.
Moving from Departmental BI to Enterprise BI
MicroStrategy’s Multi-source ROLAP engine offers a two-stage evolutionary path that allows companies to migrate departmental BI installations from departmental islands of information into a fully integrated and unified enterprise BI architecture.
In the first stage, enterprises can integrate their data into a multi-source environment. Data remains in its departmental databases but metadata and reports are merged into a single, unified BI layer. In the next stage, the departmental data can be moved from the departmental databases into the data warehouse; the MicroStrategy multi-dimensional model is redirected to the data’s new database source, and reports and dashboards will run without change.
Companies can also use multi-source ROLAP to increase the capacity of their database engines by offloading simple queries from high-end, high-cost database servers onto less expensive, general-purpose databases. The MicroStrategy engine will automatically use the inexpensive database whenever possible, using the high-end database capacity for high-volume queries.
In-memory ROLAP
By extending its existing ROLAP architecture, MicroStrategy’s new in-memory ROLAP takes advantage of the addressable memory available with the newest 64-bit operating systems, including Microsoft Windows 64, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, Red Hat Linux, and SUSE Linux.
In-memory ROLAP technology uses the extensive memory space available in 64-bit servers as “multi-dimensional memory” in which both data and calculations can reside as multi-dimensional datasets called “ROLAP cubes.”
MicroStrategy reports and dashboards are now automatically directs queries to in-memory ROLAP cubes when possible, resulting in faster query performance (compared to database-resident storage). In-memory ROLAP improves performance, especially when executing complex, process-intensive queries or those burdened by large databases.
In-memory ROLAP usage is transparent to users and report developers. Report developers can create reports using MicroStrategy metadata objects irrespective of whether the data underlying the metadata might reside within a ROLAP cube as well as in the databases. When each report is run, the MicroStrategy engine determines whether the report’s data can first be obtained from a ROLAP cube. If it cannot, the MicroStrategy engine will fetch the data from the databases.
ROLAP cubes improve performance for reports, dashboards, and OLAP analyses. Users can perform the same ROLAP functionality they are already accustomed to, regardless of the data source (from in-memory ROLAP cubes, databases, or both).
In addition, in-memory ROLAP cubes can be populated quickly and easily from any database source or data sources such as spreadsheets. Once the data resides inside an in-memory ROLAP cube, it can be a source of reusable definitions and data for reports, dashboards, and OLAP investigations by workgroup users.
In-memory ROLAP can reduce repetitive and expensive processing that normally burden database servers. By creating in-memory ROLAP cubes for the most expensive and time-consuming queries, the database engine will process these queries only once to form the various ROLAP cubes instead of at every report execution. The ROLAP cubes can be formed overnight during off-peak hours, freeing database capacity during peak hours, so databases to be properly sized to service ad hoc analyses and less-frequent reports. By offloading the database server with in-memory ROLAP cubes, companies can enjoy faster performance and produce more reports per hour, and free database servers for additional users and BI applications.
Faster, Friendlier Web User Interface
The re-engineered Web user interface includes many performance-enhancing changes that make the user interface more interactive and more instantly responsive to user requests. The interface includes many self-service features so users can extend control over the reports, formats, and data they see without IT support to make changes. For example, users can reformat reports using autostyles, graph control, font control, and title control. They can rearrange data on reports by pivot, page-by, and sorting or change the analytics using subtotals, time transformations, row calculations, and column calculations. Business users can use ROLAP’s powerful “drill-anywhere” capability.
MicroStrategy Distribution Services
MicroStrategy Distribution Services is a significant new component of the MicroStrategy platform architecture for high-volume, high-efficiency distribution of reports and dashboards with low IT administrative overhead. These services are integrated within the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, taking advantage of the server’s administrative and operational efficiencies; they also inherit the Intelligence Server’s ability to run in true 64-bit mode on such operating systems as Microsoft Windows 64, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, and Linux from Red Hat and SUSE.
With MicroStrategy 9, business users direct report distributions by specifying:
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Distribution format: HTML, Flash, PDF, or Excel
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Distribution destination: E-mail, networked printers, file servers (including portals and PCs), or their MicroStrategy report archive
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Distribution triggers (send immediately, time-based schedules, trigger on an event or alert)
Additional New Features
Report Services now includes new automatic formatting features, such as horizontal repeating sections, dynamically-selected images, vertical text layout, multi-layout reports, automatic table of contents generation, automatic pagination, and watermarks.
MicroStrategy’s dynamic dashboards can now contain more information and interactive.
The dashboards inherit full, automatically enabled OLAP drilling capability so users can perform OLAP investigations directly on the grids and graphs.HTML-accessible content (such as real-time stock tickers) can be included directly on the dashboard. New dashboard templates provide structured starting points for novice dashboard designers.