Meet MicroStrategy 10
MicroStrategy is a market leader in BI products. It has rich functionality in order to meet the requirements of modern businesses. In 2015, MicroStrategy provided a new release of MicroStrategy, version 10. It offers both agility and governance like no other BI product. In addition, it is easy to use and enterprise ready. At the same time, it is great for both IT and business. In other words, MicroStrategy 10 offers an analytics platform that combines an easy and empowering user experience, together with enterprise-grade performance, management, and security capabilities. It is true bimodal BI and moves seamlessly between styles:
Data discovery and visualization
Enterprise reporting and dashboards
In-memory high performance BI
Scales from departments to enterprises
Administration and security
MicroStrategy 10 consists of three main products: MicroStrategy Desktop, MicroStrategy Mobile and MicroStrategy Web.
MicroStrategy Desktop lets users start discovering and visualizing data instantly. It is available for Mac and PC. It allows users to connect, prepare, discover, and visualize data. In addition, we can easily promote to a MicroStrategy Server. Moreover, MicroStrategy Desktop has a brand new HTML5 interface and includes all connection drivers. It allows us to use data blending, data preparation, and data enrichment. Finally, it has powerful advanced analytics and can be integrated with R.
To cut a long story short, we want to notice the main changes of the new BI platform. All developers keep the same functionality, the looks as well as architect the same. All changes are about web interface and Intelligence Server. Let's look closer at what MicroStrategy 10 can show us.
MicroStrategy 10 expands the analytical ecosystem by using third-party toolkits such as:
Data visualization libraries: We can easily plug in and use any visualization from the expanding range of Java libraries
Statistical toolkits: R, SAS, SPSS, KXEN, and others
Geolocation data visualization: This uses mapping capabilities to visualize and interact with location data
MicroStrategy 10 has more than 25 new data sources that we can connect to quickly and simply. In addition, it allows us to build reports on top of other BI tools, such as SAP Business Objects, Cognos, and Oracle BI. It has a new connector to Hadoop, which uses the native connector. Moreover, it allows us to blend multiple data sources in-memory.
We want to notice that MicroStrategy 10 has got reach functionality for work with data such as:
Streamlined workflows to parse and prepare data
Multi-table in-memory support from different sources
Automatically parse and prepare data with every refresh
100+ inbuilt functions to profile and clean data
Create custom groups on the fly without coding
In terms of connection to Hadoop, most BI products use Hive or Impala ODBC drivers in order to use SQL to get data from Hadoop. However, this method is bad in terms of performance. MicroStrategy 10 queries directly against Hadoop. As a result, it is up to 50 times faster than via ODBC.
Let's look at some of the main technical changes that have significantly improved MicroStrategy. The platform is now faster than ever before, because it doesn't have a two-billion-row limit on in-memory datasets and allows us to create analytical cubes up to 16 times bigger in size. It publishes cubes dramatically faster. Moreover, MicroStrategy 10 has higher data throughput and cubes can be loaded in parallel 4 times faster with multi-threaded parallel loading. In addition, the in-memory engine allows us to create cubes 80 times larger than before, and we can access data from cubes 50% faster, by using up to 8 parallel threads. Look at the following table, where we compare in-memory cube functionality in version 9 versus version 10:
|
Feature |
Ver. 9 |
Ver. 10 |
|
Data volume |
100 GB |
~2TB |
|
Number of rows |
2 billion |
200 billion |
|
Load rate |
8 GB/hour |
~200 GB/hour |
|
Data model |
Star schema |
Any schema, tabular or multiple sets |
In order to make the administration of MicroStrategy more effective in the new version, MicroStrategy Operation Manager was released. It gives MicroStrategy administrators powerful development tools to monitor, automate, and control systems. Operations Manager gives us:
Centralized management in a web browser
Enterprise Manager console within Tool
Triggers and 24/7 alerts
System health monitors
Server management
Multiple environment administration
MicroStrategy 10 education and certification
MicroStrategy 10 offers new training courses that can be conducted offline in a training center, or online at http://www.microstrategy.com/us/services/education. We believe that certification is a good thing on your journey. The following certifications now exist for version 10:
MicroStrategy 10 Certified Associated Analyst
MicroStrategy 10 Certified Application Designer
MicroStrategy 10 Certified Application Developer
MicroStrategy 10 Certified Administrator
After passing all of these exams, you will become a MicroStrategy 10 Application Engineer. More details can be found here: http://www.microstrategy.com/Strategy/media/downloads/training-events/MicroStrategy-certification-matrix_v10.pdf.
History of MicroStrategy
Let us briefly look at the history of MicroStrategy, which began in 1991:
1991: Released first BI product, which allowed users to create graphical views and analyses of information data
2000: Released MicroStrategy 7 with a web interface
2003: First to release a fully integrated reporting tool, combining list reports, BI-style dashboards, and interface analyses in a single module.
2005: Released MicroStrategy 8, including one-click actions and drag-and-drop dashboard creation
2009: Released MicroStrategy 9, delivering a seamless consolidated path from department to enterprise BI
2010: Unveiled new mobile BI capabilities for iPad and iPhone, and was featured on the iTunes Bestseller List
2011: Released MicroStrategy Cloud, the first SaaS offering from a major BI vendor
2012: Released Visual Data Discovery and groundbreaking new security platform, Usher
2013: Released expanded Analytics Platform and free Analytics Desktop client
2014: Announced availability of MicroStrategy Analytics via Amazon Web Services (AWS)
2015: MicroStrategy 10 was released, the first ever enterprise analytics solution for centralized and decentralized BI