Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy

Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy

by Dmitry Anoshin, Himani Rana, Ning Ma
Released July 2016
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781785884405

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Book description

Build world-class enterprise Business Intelligence solutions with MicroStrategy 10

About This Book

  • Fix the gap between BI tools and implementation/integration processes with big data and predictive analytics using this comprehensive guide to MicroStrategy 10
  • Highly practical, example-rich guide that lets you implement business intelligence with MicroStrategy 10 in your organization
  • Create the best user experience with BI dashboards using MicroStrategy using this up-to-date, comprehensive guide

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for BI, DWH, ETL developers, BI/DWH/Analytics managers, analysts, and business users who already have MicroStrategy in their organization and want to take it to the next level in order to increase performance and improve user experience. In addition, it helps the reader to migrate from MicroStrategy 9 to MicroStrategy 10 and to start using the new capabilities.

What You Will Learn

  • Explore various visualization techniques for presenting analyzed data
  • Customize MicroStrategy in order to meet your business requirements
  • Develop and design mobile dashboards
  • Use the advanced techniques such as designing reports, documents and interactive dashboards for building dashboards
  • Understand the concepts of data discovery and Desktop capabilities
  • Explore the best practices for Microstrategy system administration
  • Find and fix issues based on connections, environment or documents
  • Integrate third party ESRI map tools with MicroStrategy to create geo based reports

In Detail

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.

Style and approach

This book will be focusing on providing extensive guide to plan how to design and develop complex BI architecture for real world scenario, using Microstrategy 10, best practices and collected experience working with BI, predictive analytics, and Microstrategy and big data.

Table of contents

  1. Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy
    1. Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy
    2. Credits
    3. About the Authors
    4. About the Reviewer
    5. www.PacktPub.com
      1. eBooks, discount offers, and more
        1. Why subscribe?
    6. Preface
      1. What this book covers
      2. What you need for this book
      3. Who this book is for
      4. Conventions
      5. Reader feedback
      6. Customer support
        1. Downloading the color images of this book
        2. Errata
        3. Piracy
        4. Questions
    7. 1. Getting Started with MicroStrategy
      1. Modern BI
        1. BI market
        2. Maturity level of the organization
      2. BI project life cycle
      3. Meet MicroStrategy 10
        1. MicroStrategy 10 education and certification
        2. History of MicroStrategy
      4. Deploying MicroStrategy 10
        1. Overview of training architecture
        2. Creating a Red Hat Linux virtual machine
          1. Performing prerequisites for MicroStrategy 10
        3. Installing MicroStrategy 10 Intelligence Server
          1. Installation process
        4. Configuring Intelligence Server
          1. Installing a PostgreSQL database
          2. Creating a metadata database
          3. Creating a metadata data source
          4. Creating metadata tables
        5. Installation of MicroStrategy Web
          1. Web application server installation
          2. Deploying WAR files
        6. Creating a network
        7. Installing MicroStrategy 10 tools
        8. Installing Oracle database
          1. Deploying data in Oracle database
      5. BI tips
        1. BI skills
        2. BI users' development
        3. BI portal
      6. Summary
    8. 2. Setting Up an Analytics Semantic Layer and Public Objects
      1. BI architecture
        1. Components of BI architecture
      2. The project design process
        1. Logical data model design
        2. Data warehouse schema design
        3. Project creation in MicroStrategy architecture
          1. Creating a data source
          2. Creating a project
          3. Using the project creation assistant
          4. Using MicroStrategy Architect
          5. Creating schema objects
        4. Managing project schema
      3. Schema objects
        1. Attributes
          1. Attribute types
          2. Attribute form expression types
          3. General attribute example
          4. Creating an attribute from Architect
          5. Creating an attribute from the Desktop
        2. Facts
          1. Fact types
          2. Fact expression types
          3. SQL representation
          4. Creating a fact from Architect
          5. Creating a fact from the Desktop
        3. Hierarchies
          1. Example
          2. Creating a user hierarchy and attribute relationships
            1. Creating a user hierarchy and attribute relationships from Architect
            2. Creating a user hierarchy and attribute relationships from Desktop
      4. Public objects
        1. Metrics
          1. Types of metric
          2. Creating metrics
        2. Prompts
          1. Example of creating an Object prompt
        3. Filters
          1. Create a standalone filter
          2. Filter operators
          3. Example of how these filters are used
          4. SQL based on report filter
      5. Summary
    9. 3. Building Advanced Reports and Documents
      1. Advanced reporting components
      2. Custom groups
        1. Creating a custom group
        2. Custom group examples
        3. Custom group SQL
        4. Custom group display options
        5. Custom group interaction with report filters
      3. Consolidation
        1. Consolidation elements
        2. Creating consolidations
        3. Consolidation examples
        4. SQL based on consolidation
        5. Consolidation and custom group comparison
      4. Transformations
        1. Building a transformation
        2. Transformation components
      5. Drill maps
      6. Freeform SQL
        1. Creating a Freeform SQL report
        2. Freeform SQL features
          1. Prompt
          2. Security filters
      7. Intelligent cube
        1. Enabling and disabling intelligent cube usage
      8. Advanced reports
      9. Creating and adding data to the document
        1. Document controls
      10. Moving towards a dashboard
      11. Linking reports and documents
      12. Summary
    10. 4. Advanced Visualization Techniques
      1. Dashboard style document
        1. Panels
          1. Filter panel
        2. Selectors
          1. Types of selector
      2. Basic visualization (graphs)
        1. One attribute, one metric - Vertical Line - Absolute graph
        2. One attribute, two metrics - Budgeting
        3. One attribute, three metrics - Bubble chart
        4. One attribute, four metrics - Stock: Hi-Lo-Open-Close
        5. One attribute, five metrics - Boxplot
        6. Complex graph - Gantt
      3. Widgets
        1. Date selection widget
        2. Graph matrix widgets
        3. Heat map widget
        4. Map widget
        5. Network widgets
        6. Survey widget
        7. Timeline widget
      4. Visual insight
        1. Adding additional visualizations
      5. MicroStrategy and ESRI map integration
        1. Creating reports in MicroStrategy for Geo-based analysis
      6. MicroStrategy and Google Maps integration
      7. Summary
    11. 5. Customization of MicroStrategy
      1. Before we start
      2. What is SDK
        1. Where to get documentations and resources
      3. Overview of Web SDK
        1. MicroStrategy Web architecture
        2. MicroStrategy plugin architecture
        3. Deploying SDK and configuring WCE in Linux
        4. Installing SDK and configuring WCE in Windows
        5. Best practices for customizations and upgrades
      4. Customization pages
      5. Web Beans
        1. Applications of Web Beans
      6. Customizing MicroStrategy styles with CSS
        1. Applications of CSS customization
      7. Adding advanced visualization with SDK
        1. Installing Visualization SDK
        2. Introduction to Visualization Builder
        3. Application of Visualization Builder
      8. Overview of advanced web customization with MicroStrategy API
      9. Overview of Mobile SDK
        1. Mobile SDK for iOS
        2. Mobile SDK for Android
        3. Application of Mobile SDK – Rebranding
          1. Set up the MicroStrategy Mobile project
          2. Rebranding the application
      10. Summary
    12. 6. Predictive Analysis with MicroStrategy
      1. Predictive analysis in MicroStrategy 10
        1. Licensing requirements
        2. Native analytical functions in MicroStrategy 10
      2. Integrating R with MicroStrategy
        1. Installing R
        2. Installing R Integration Pack
        3. Creating a neural network model in R and exporting it as a PMML file
      3. Data mining overview
        1. Purpose of data mining
        2. Limitations of data mining
        3. Terminologies
          1. Target variable, explanatory variable
          2. Continuous variable, categorical variable
          3. Training, validation, modeling
          4. Supervised learning, unsupervised learning
          5. Classification, prediction
        4. Data mining techniques
      4. Four steps to achieve data mining in MicroStrategy
        1. Creating a dataset
        2. Selecting variables
        3. Developing the model
        4. Creating a validation report
        5. Deploying the model
      5. Business applications of predictive analysis
        1. Forecasting quarterly revenues using linear regression and exponential regression with seasonality
        2. Forecasting quarterly revenues for different regions using tree regression analysis
        3. Forecasting monthly revenues using time series analysis
        4. Telco churn analysis using classification
        5. Telco churn analysis using decision tree
        6. Telco churn analysis using logistic regression
      6. Automating the predictive mechanism
      7. Summary
    13. 7. Accelerating Your Business with Mobile Analytics
      1. Before we start
        1. Mobile Server
        2. Mobile Client
      2. Mobile Server installation and configuration
      3. Creating a mobile application
        1. Determine business goals
        2. Storyboarding and planning
        3. Creating an iPad Landscape template
          1. Unhide document templates
          2. Creating templates
        4. Dataset creation
        5. Panel stack and panels for Sales Performance App
        6. Creating a Home page for Sales Performance App
          1. Creating a profit pie chart for Home
          2. Creating a revenue time series graph for Home
          3. Creating KPI for Home
          4. Creating a top 5 units sold bar chart for Home
        7. Creating a Product page for Sales Performance App
        8. Creating a Region page for Sales Performance App
        9. Creating a Trend page for Sales Performance App
        10. Creating a Customer page for Sales Performance App
        11. Prompts in mobile applications
        12. Views in mobile applications
        13. Linking
      4. Best practices
        1. Dedicated vs unified design
        2. Purpose, audience, and prototype
      5. Extending mobile capabilities
        1. Transaction services
        2. Mobile SDK
      6. Deployment
      7. Summary
    14. 8. Data Discovery with MicroStrategy Desktop
      1. Meet MicroStrategy Desktop
      2. MicroStrategy Desktop interface
      3. Building ad hoc schemas
        1. Data mashup of Oracle and flat files
        2. Data profiling of geography data
      4. Building a dashboard
        1. Line charts
        2. Area charts
        3. Bar charts
        4. Bubble charts
      5. Publishing the dashboard
      6. Performing Pareto analysis
      7. Performing cohort analysis
      8. Deploying D3 visualization
      9. Desktop versus Tableau
      10. Summary
    15. 9. MicroStrategy System Administration
      1. Managing MicroStrategy platform
      2. Monitoring MicroStrategy
      3. Deploying Enterprise Manager and collecting statistics
      4. Project life cycle with Object Manager
      5. Integrity Manager overview
      6. System Manager overview
      7. Activating Change Journal
      8. Summary
    16. 10. Design and Implementation of the Security Model
      1. MicroStrategy security overview
        1. Users and groups
        2. Privileges and security roles
        3. Row-level security
        4. MicroStrategy objects permission
      2. Security design
      3. Security model deployment
      4. Building an advanced security model
      5. Summary
    17. 11. Big Data Analytics with MicroStrategy
      1. Hadoop and MicroStrategy
        1. Hadoop architecture
        2. MicroStrategy Analytics Platform over Hadoop
        3. Hadoop and MicroStrategy use cases
          1. Example of log file analysis in a Hadoop system
        4. Configuring Hortonworks and MicroStrategy
      2. Connecting Hortonworks with MicroStrategy
        1. Setting up an ODBC connector
        2. Setting up a MicroStrategy environment
      3. Design your first Hadoop dashboard
        1. Data wrangling
      4. Splunk and MicroStrategy
        1. What is Splunk
        2. Splunk architecture
        3. Splunk and MicroStrategy use cases
        4. Deploying Splunk
        5. Installing the Splunk ODBC driver
        6. Creating reports from Splunk
      5. Summary
    18. 12. MicroStrategy Troubleshooting
      1. Meeting the MicroStrategy Community
      2. Setting up MicroStrategy Health Center
      3. Discovering MicroStrategy logs
        1. How the DSSErrors file works
      4. Overview of the MicroStrategy Diagnostics and Performance Logging tool
      5. Contacting MicroStrategy Support
      6. Exploring problems with security
      7. Discovering data discrepancy issues
      8. Summary

Product information

  • Title: Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy
  • Author(s): Dmitry Anoshin, Himani Rana, Ning Ma
  • Release date: July 2016
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781785884405