Let's talk a little bit about usual BI projects. Usually, we use several environments, such as development, test, and production. It gives us flexibility and we can make sure that no one will destroy production. We can build new staff on development then test it on test and then promote to the production. In MicroStrategy, we should use Object Manager. Object Manager tracks the version ID of every object in MicroStrategy. Be aware that if you apply changes on both environments, then the version ID of objects will be different. That's why it is important to not make any changes on production, because it will be difficult to maintain consistency of the project across various environments.

Another feature of Object Manager is that it searches all dependents, such as schema objects, public objects, and so on. We can select from metadata tables all the information about relationships between objects:

SELECT * FROM DSSMDOBJDEPN;

There is a very good presentation about Object Migration Management at http://www.slideshare.net/BryanBrandow/world-2010-migration-process.

Let's look at the interface of Object Manager by running it from the MicroStrategy Products folder:

There is red widget that allows us to compare projects in different environments and then promote only the changes. We have two options to promote changes:

Very often during direct migration, we can break something, for example, MicroStrategy schemas. Therefore, it is better to use packages. In cases where we use a package, we can always roll back.

Usually, Object Manager is used for migrating part of projects. However, if we need to migrate an entire project, we should use the Project Merge wizard.