Here's a quick tip to follow up with Answering Prompts via URL API. If you need to get the Object ID of an Attribute or Metric dynamically, you can use this syntax:
I read a lot about BI implementations failure. I wrote myself an article about it few months ago. But I have a question: what a BI implementation need to succeed? I ask this question also to the members of Business Intelligence Professionals on LinkedIn.
Hiring resources is easy. Hiring good resources is hard, especially when you need to make that determination by asking general questions. With the cost of a bad hire so high, many groups or organizations can't risk a bad hire, though many don't set themselves up for success. They ask generic or pointed questions that are often definition driven or to tell stories about their past. A candidate's charisma usually shows through more than anything, and while that's an important quality, it's not the only quality. More often than we'd like, the person we hire isn't the person we thought were were getting.
While the Interview Questions I've posted before are more geared towards finding the qualities I'm interested in (hint: textbook MicroStrategy recitation isn't one of them), this post is geared towards actually testing an individual. Ideally, you'd still do the face to face question based interview and if you feel good about the candidate, you can give them this hands on test. Just setup a machine with the Tutorial project loaded on a local or development IServer. There are a few places where you'll need to do some initial setup before you introduce the candidate, and I've outlined those. I've also broken it out into three posts depending on what level of skills you're interested in: Developer, Admin, Architect. You would sit down with the candidate, explain the requirement, and watch them work. You'll get more information form a few minutes of one of these sessions than from days of face to face interviews.
I recently read an interesting interview about mobile business intelligence, BI trends and cloud computing with Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy. The interview was made by Jason Stamper from Computer Business Review, who is now widely regarded throughout Europe as „The Economist” of the IT industry.
I've noticed that in my experience, most users log into a single project. Either because there's only one project in the environment, or because the projects are specific to their department or function and it's the only one they have access to. With that, it's always slightly annoyed me that a user has to login and then click to access the single project they have.
Freeform SQL Reports
Author:
Bit Software
Freeform SQL Reports can be a handy tool in your MicroStrategy bag of tricks. We're all tempted to turn to them from time to time, but when is the right time and what kinds of tricks can we manage by leveraging them? As always, the answer to the first question is going to be a personal preference and depend greatly on your project scenarios. Today I'll offer my opinions, as well as highlight some of the tricks you can do with Freeform SQL Reports.
One of the most important features to control in tuning your MicroStrategy environment is controlling Job Prioritization in the Intelligence Server. In the event that you have more concurrent jobs running than open slots on the database, queuing will occur. When a Job is in the Waiting status, that could be giving a very poor user experience. Fortunately, you do have some control to tell MicroStrategy which Jobs are more important than others. Today, I'll talk about how the Job Prioritization works, what options you have, and the Job Prioritization strategy that I use in my environments.
Job Prioritization occurs at the Database Instance and is a Governing setting for sending queries to the database. While there are Governing settings for the Intelligence Server to control concurrent jobs, those are system wide settings and are generally set very high (~100). The reason is that the Intelligence Server doesn't really have to do a lot of processing per job, at least compared to the amount the database has to do to retrieve the data.
Prioritization works by managing three slots: High, Medium and Low. By default, a job has Low priority. Jobs include not only Reports but also Prompt requests, and each Report on a Document counts as a separate job.
You can classify the priority of any given job in a number of ways, but the most direct is to setup the classification rules in the Job Prioritization Wizard. This can be found by opening the Database Instance for your Warehouse (Desktop -> Administration -> Configuration Objects -> Database Instances) and selecting the Job Prioritization tab, then clicking New. The wizard allows you to set global rules based on the type of job, the project it belongs to or the user requesting it.
by Bryan Brandow
(This article was first published on Bryan`s MicroStrategy Blog)
I've met a lot of people that have been confused about Administrative privileges in MicroStrategy and how they relate to their licensing costs. The confusion possibly is related to an old bundle MicroStrategy used to sell called "Administrator" which included the products Object Manager, Enterprise Manager and Command Manager. While those tools are critical to administer a system, they aren't related to actual Administrative privileges like killing jobs, creating schedules, clearing caches or reloading projects. The truth is that administrative privileges don't require any license beyond a Desktop license and in fact are very granular. You can grant any user access to manage anything in MicroStrategy from full on administrative functions to simple things like clearing the cache.
The healthcare industry in most countries is dealing with low revenues as well as a great lack of organization. Even in the healthcare public sector, they try to increase revenues as it allows them to buy better equipment, increase capacity and thus, obtain more income from the state.
Even If, in most of the cases it is hard to make managers, from hospitals and laboratories, understand that a Business Intelligence solution would help them lower their costs, increase revenues and help organize their structure, it is noticeable they are changing their minds and try to accept the idea that a BI solution would not be a waste of money, but a great help on their daily operations.
How many times do they underuse a ward due to a bad schedule? It is not rare to see a doctor coming into an operating theatre with a patient and find out that operating theater is already taken. It is also not rare that a patient in recovery needs to be moved from one room to another because of schedule overlapping.
A Business Intelligence solution would easily help managers:
Google Map Widget
Author:
Bit Software
One of the eagerly anticipated features added to 9.2 was the addition of an out of the box Google Map Widget. Well, not technically out of the box, but at least a provided plugin with easy to follow instructions for setting it up. While the steps seem straight forward, I often see a lot of questions surrounding it. There`s also a surprise waiting for you if you're currently enjoying the plugin in 9.2 and haven't yet upgraded to 9.2.1.
