Book Image

Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy

By : Dmitry Anoshin, Himani Rana, Ning Ma, Neil Mehta
Book Image

Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy

By: Dmitry Anoshin, Himani Rana, Ning Ma, Neil Mehta

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 an absolute leader in the BI market and offers rich capabilities from basic data visualizations to predictive analytics. It lets you various delivery methods such as the Web, desktops, and mobiles. Using real-world BI scenarios, this book helps you to implement Business Analytics solutions in big e-commerce companies. It kicks off with MicroStrategy 10 features and then covers schema design models and techniques. Building upon your existing knowledge, the book will teach you advanced techniques for building documents and dashboards. It further teaches various graphical techniques for presenting data for analysis using maps, graphs, and advanced charts. Although MicroStrategy has rich functionality, the book will show how to customize it in order to meet your business requirements. You will also become familiar with the native analytical functions that will help you to maximize the impact of BI solutions with powerful predictive analytics. Furthermore, the book will focus on MicroStrategy Mobile Analytics along with data discovery and desktop capabilities such as connecting various data sources and building interactive dashboards. The book will also uncover best practices, troubleshooting techniques for MicroStrategy system administration, and also security and authentication techniques. Lastly, you will learn to use Hadoop for MicroStrategy reporting. By the end of the book, you will become proficient in evaluating any BI software in order to choose the best one that meets all business requirements.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

About the Authors

Dmitry Anoshin is a data-centric technologist and a recognized expert in building and implementing business/digital analytics solutions. He has a successful track record when it comes to implementing business and digital intelligence projects in numerous industries, including retail, finance, marketing, and e-commerce. Dmitry possesses in-depth knowledge of digital/Business Intelligence, ETL, data warehousing, and big data technologies. He has extensive experience in the data integration process and is proficient at using various data warehousing methodologies. Dmitry constantly exceeds project expectations when he works for financial, machine tool, and retail industries. He has completed a number of multinational full BI/DI solution life cycle implementation projects. With expertise in data modeling, Dmitry also has a background and business experience in multiple relation databases, OLAP systems, and NoSQL databases. He has a technical blog at http://techbusinessintelligence.blogspot.ru/ and publishes his presentations at http://www.slideshare.net/dimoobraznii. In addition, he has written books for Packt Publishing, SAP Lumira Essentials and Learning Hunk. In addition, he reviewed the following books for Packt Publishing: SAP BusinessObjects Reporting Cookbook, Creating Universes with SAP BusinessObjects, and Learning SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.

For my beautiful wife Svetlana, for my son Vasily, who is a champion of everything, and my daughter Anna, who is a little princess. Thank you for support. I love you! 

Himani Rana is a senior data scientist and has been working as database developer and MicroStrategy specialist for multinational companies since 2007. She is currently pursuing her PhD in data mining and big data. She completed her master's in data mining and vehicular ad hoc networks. She has to her credit the following publication: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6557928. Himani possesses in-depth knowledge of Business Intelligence and big data technologies. She specializes in insurance and financial data analysis because of her Chartered Insurance Professional (CIP) designation. In addition, she was a committee member and reviewer of Information Systems, Technology and Management (http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642291654) and 2011 Third International Conference on Advanced Computing (ICoAC) (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6156880).

I would like to thank four pillars of my life: my father (V.K. Rana), my mother (Usha Rana), my husband (Rahul Jaswal) and my daughter (Samaira Jaswal), for their love and support. Also, I would like to thank everyone who helped me in completing this work.

Ning Ma is an experienced data analyst working in an insurance company. He is experienced with statistical modeling, creating executive dashboards, fraud detection, text mining and teaching. He is also knowledgeable about implementing predictive analysis in MicroStrategy.  He enjoys helping business users discovering knowledge from data, by visualizing data patterns and testing hypotheses. He is passionate about producing easy-to-use data products to support business decision making. Prior to his current position, he worked in China doing IT and investment jobs.  He did his computer science and economics undergraduate studies in Beijing, economics and finance graduate studies in Canada, and did research on quantitative finance in Canada. In his free time, he loves reading, electronic arts, and all kinds of outdoor activities.

I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Karen Kramer, who opened the door of MicroStrategy for me, and funded my advanced training programs. I am deeply in debt to Charlene Harris and Heather Morrison for teaching me applied MicroStrategy skills. I am also grateful to Neil Mehta for assembling the team together. I thank Dmitry Anoshin for being a great team leader, and a whip. I also thank Himani Jaswal for her help, Riddhi Tuljapurkar and Pranav Kukreti for giving me comments and for their amazing patience.