Book Image

Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook

By : Davide Moraschi
Book Image

Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook

By: Davide Moraschi

Overview of this book

Business intelligence is becoming more important by the day, with cloud offerings and mobile devices gaining wider acceptance and achieving better market penetration. MicroStrategy Reporting Suite is a complete business intelligence platform that covers all the data analysis needs of an enterprise. Scorecards, dashboards, and reports can be explored and delivered on desktop, the Web, mobile devices, and the Cloud. With the latest Visual Insight tool, MicroStrategy brings the power of BI to the business users, allowing them to discover information without the help of IT personnel. Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook covers the full cycle of a BI project with the MicroStrategy platform, from setting up the software to using dashboards in the cloud and on mobile devices. This book uses step-by-step instructions to teach you everything from the very basics to the more advanced topics. We will start by downloading and installing the software and a well-known sample SQL Server database. Then, one brick at a time, we will construct a fully-featured BI solution with a web interface, mobile reporting, and agile analytics. The chapters are ordered by increasing difficulty, and each one builds on top of the preceding chapter so that the learning process is progressive. The examples given in this book are practical, and you will be able to see the immediate result of your efforts. We will first cover setting up the platform, including the creation of the metadata and the different objects that are part of a BI project: tables, attributes, and metrics. Then, we take a look at how to create and analyze reports, charts, documents, and dashboards, as well as how to manipulate data with the desktop application, the web Interface, and an iPad device. The last part of the book is dedicated to advanced topics like the new agile analytics technology from MicroStrategy, where we cover both Visual Insight and MicroStrategy Cloud Express. Whether you are a database developer, data analyst, or a business user, Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook will get you up to speed with one of the most powerful BI platforms on the market with the smallest possible investment of time and money.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Refreshing dashboard data


Data changes over time and, after every new load, cached datasets must be refreshed. Express accesses your RDBMS the first time you create a dashboard, and then stores a copy of the results for later analysis. Whenever the data changes on the data warehouse, Express must reload an updated copy. This can be done manually or on a schedule.

The manual process is the same as we used in the preceding recipe; just select database connection, tables, and fields; in this recipe, we will look at how the whole procedure can be automated to run unattended.

When automating schedules in Express, the time is always set according to GMT clock. This means that the daylight saving time is not taken into account, and your loads will run at a different time in summer (in case your country observes DST). For example, a 2 A.M. GMT load would run at 3 A.M. in Rome during winter, and 4 A.M. during summer.

Note

Bookmark this URL http://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/events.html just in case...