There is an increasing demand, from users across all organizations, for higher BI performance, driven by the rapid growth of data volumes and number of users. In this recipe, we will see how to transform a report into a cube.
In-Memory cubes help reduce data transfer between the RDBMS and the Intelligence Server, thus decreasing network bandwidth utilization.
A faster response helps improve user satisfaction, and ultimately, wide adoption of the platform and productivity.
When we execute an In-Memory cube, no data is displayed. The query is run and the result set is stored in memory ready to be used by reports, documents, or Visual Insight analyses (starting from 9.3.1 analyses are called dashboards). The process of executing a cube is known as publishing. A cube cannot be used if it is not published.
Probably the easiest way to build a cube is converting an existing report. It is a convenient way to see and validate the actual dataset that will be included before publishing it.
We will convert the report named 28 InternetSales Dashboard:
- Go to My Reports folder and right-click on the report number 28; from the context menu, select Edit to open the Report Editor.
- Open the Data menu and click on Intelligent Cube Options | Convert to Intelligent Cube; you will see the icon in the title bar of this window changing to a little blue cube.
- Click on File | Save As… and name it
28 InternetSales Cube. - From the toolbar, click on the Run Report button to execute it.
- A message will appear saying that execution is complete and result data has been published as an Intelligent Cube. Click on Save and Close.
- In Folder List on the left, navigate to Administration | System Monitors | Caches | Intelligent Cubes; right-click on 28 InternetSales Cube and select Quick View from the context menu.
- In this window you can see interesting information about the recently created cube like the size, the number of rows, and the last update time.
You can right-click on 28 InternetSales Cube in My Reports and open the SQL View. The SELECT statement sent to the RDBMS is the same as the original report, but the data is stored in memory and on disk for later use (you can find it under C:Program FilesMicroStrategyIntelligence ServerCube<machine name><some more strange chars><Intelligent Cube Instance ID>.cube).
Cubes can be unloaded from memory to make more space available when they're not used, and reloaded from the context menu by right-clicking on the cube icon in the Administration | System Monitors | Caches | Intelligent Cubes folder. See the screen capture:
To revert the action and load the cube back in memory, right-click again and choose Load in memory:
