According to Forrester and Gartner, MicroStrategy is one of the leaders in the Enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) market. MicroStrategy constantly improves their BI product in order to meet the requirements of all sizes of businesses, from small businesses or startups and to worldwide international companies.
MicroStrategy 10 is an absolutely new product and has lots of new capabilities. It allows companies to quickly analyze their data and find business insights. It has rich functionality for all kinds of users, such as powerful desktop clients, in-memory technologies, and great visualizations capabilities. In addition, it supports modern trends of machine learning and data science because it can be integrated with analytical vendors such as SAS and IBM, and open source technologies, such as R and Python. Moreover, it allows us to use extended visualization libraries such as D3.js and others in order to create dashboards with the best user experience ever. In addition, MicroStrategy is a leader in mobile analytics, and offers the best solutions for mobile devices. Finally, MicroStrategy 10 was designed specifically for working with big data and big data technologies.
This book will be focusing on providing an extensive guide to plan how to design and develop complex BI architecture for real-world scenarios using MicroStrategy 10, best practices, and collected experience working with BI, predictive analytics, MicroStrategy, and big data.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with MicroStrategy, will talk about how to download and install MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise as well as create a MicroStrategy repository. Moreover, the reader will learn about the various components of MicroStrategy as well as learn MicroStrategy architecture. In addition, the reader will meet the analytics project life cycle. Finally, the reader will learn about real-world business scenarios and deploy data marts in local databases.
Chapter 2, Setting Up an Analytics Semantic Layer and Public Objects, covers schema design; schema objects such as attributes, hierarchies, facts, and displays; and the parent-child relationship between these attributes. It will also cover public objects such as metrics, prompts, and filters, which are important in creating reports.
Chapter 3, Building Advanced Reports and Documents, explains the design of reports, documents, and interactive dashboards. It discusses advanced techniques such as creating banding and other custom groups using year-to-date or month-to-date transformations, and creating virtual attributes using consolidations.
Chapter 4, Advanced Visualization Techniques, covers graphical techniques of presenting data for analysis using maps, graphs, and advanced charts. Also, we will discuss integrating third-party ESRI map tools with MicroStrategy to create geo-based reports.
Chapter 5, Customization of MicroStrategy, will provide information about the MicroStrategy SDK and how to use it in order to customize the web interface or change functionalities. Despite the fact that MicroStrategy has rich functionality, it is possible to customize MicroStrategy in order to meet taught business requirements. In addition, the reader will learn how to create custom widgets and visualizations.
Chapter 6, Predictive Analysis with MicroStrategy, will explain native analytical functions as well as how to connect to open source data mining products in order to solve real-world business tasks. MicroStrategy maximizes the impact of BI solutions with powerful predictive analytics. MicroStrategy provides an extensive library of native analytical functions and scoring algorithms, along with an SDK to integrate with third-party and open source statistical and data mining products.
Chapter 7, Accelerating Your Business with Mobile Analytics, will talk about MicroStrategy mobile architecture as well as the development process, which involves visual design and deployment. In addition, the reader will learn how to deploy a mobile server. Mobile applications are ubiquitous in today’s world. Mobilizing reports and analytics enables a superior level of information sharing and collaboration within an organization.
Chapter 8, Data Discovery with MicroStrategy Desktop, will cover how to download and install Desktop and explains the business cases that can be solved with this powerful tool. MicroStrategy Desktop is a powerful self-service data discovery tool. Moreover, the reader will learn about data discovery and Desktop capabilities, such as connecting various data sources and building interactive dashboards.
Chapter 9, MicroStrategy System Administration, will learn about administrator tools and duties. Moreover, the reader will learn about common errors with MicroStrategy Server and their solutions. Usually, Enterprise BI has complex architecture, a lot of users, and high load. As a result, MicroStrategy offers rich functionality, which helps us to handle the complexity of BI architecture and make our analytics solution reliable with a higher performance.
Chapter 10, Design and Implementation of the Security Model, will include information on the best practices of the design, deployment, and documentation of a complex security model, which can handle 1,000+ users using various capabilities of MicroStrategy. Usually, big companies have many departments and employees with various levels of access to corporate data and the enterprise data warehouse. In addition, the reader will meet various authentications methods that are supported by MicroStrategy.
Chapter 11, Big Data Analytics with MicroStrategy, explains big data and its relevance. Also, it will cover Hadoop and its distributions and, finally, show you how to connect to the Hadoop database and integrate MicroStrategy with Hadoop. Moreover, the reader will learn how to connect MicroStrategy to Splunk.
Chapter 12, MicroStrategy Troubleshooting, cover the best way of shooting any issues with the MicroStrategy platform using logs and many other things.