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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Seitenzahl: 256
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy
Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: July 2016
Production reference: 1250716
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
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Birmingham
B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78588-440-5
www.packtpub.com
Credits
Authors
Dmitry Anoshin
Himani Rana
Ning Ma
Copy Editor
Safis Editing
Reviewer
Felipe Vilela
Project Coordinator
Devanshi Doshi
Commissioning Editor
Veena Pagare
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor
Reshma Raman
Indexer
Tejal Daruwale Soni
Content Development Editor
Riddhi Tuljapurkar
Graphics
Abhinash Sahu
Technical Editor
Pranav Kukreti
Production Coordinator
Melwyn Dsa
About the Authors
Dmitry Anoshin is a data-centric technologist and a recognized expert in building and implementing business/digital analytics solutions. He has a successful track record when it comes to implementing business and digital intelligence projects in numerous industries, including retail, finance, marketing, and e-commerce. Dmitry possesses in-depth knowledge of digital/Business Intelligence, ETL, data warehousing, and big data technologies. He has extensive experience in the data integration process and is proficient at using various data warehousing methodologies. Dmitry constantly exceeds project expectations when he works for financial, machine tool, and retail industries. He has completed a number of multinational full BI/DI solution life cycle implementation projects. With expertise in data modeling, Dmitry also has a background and business experience in multiple relation databases, OLAP systems, and NoSQL databases. He has a technical blog at http://techbusinessintelligence.blogspot.ru/ and publishes his presentations at http://www.slideshare.net/dimoobraznii. In addition, he has written books for Packt Publishing, SAP Lumira Essentials and Learning Hunk. In addition, he reviewed the following books for Packt Publishing: SAP BusinessObjects Reporting Cookbook, Creating Universes with SAP BusinessObjects, and Learning SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.
For my beautiful wife Svetlana, for my son Vasily, who is a champion of everything, and my daughter Anna, who is a little princess. Thank you for support. I love you!
Himani Rana is a senior data scientist and has been working as database developer and MicroStrategy specialist for multinational companies since 2007. She is currently pursuing her PhD in data mining and big data. She completed her master's in data mining and vehicular ad hoc networks. She has to her credit the following publication: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6557928. Himani possesses in-depth knowledge of Business Intelligence and big data technologies. She specializes in insurance and financial data analysis because of her Chartered Insurance Professional (CIP) designation. In addition, she was a committee member and reviewer of Information Systems, Technology and Management (http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642291654) and 2011 Third International Conference on Advanced Computing (ICoAC) (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6156880).
I would like to thank four pillars of my life: my father (V.K. Rana), my mother (Usha Rana), my husband (Rahul Jaswal) and my daughter (Samaira Jaswal), for their love and support. Also, I would like to thank everyone who helped me in completing this work.
Ning Ma is an experienced data analyst working in an insurance company. He is experienced with statistical modeling, creating executive dashboards, fraud detection, text mining and teaching. He is also knowledgeable about implementing predictive analysis in MicroStrategy. He enjoys helping business users discovering knowledge from data, by visualizing data patterns and testing hypotheses. He is passionate about producing easy-to-use data products to support business decision making. Prior to his current position, he worked in China doing IT and investment jobs. He did his computer science and economics undergraduate studies in Beijing, economics and finance graduate studies in Canada, and did research on quantitative finance in Canada. In his free time, he loves reading, electronic arts, and all kinds of outdoor activities.
I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Karen Kramer, who opened the door of MicroStrategy for me, and funded my advanced training programs. I am deeply in debt to Charlene Harris and Heather Morrison for teaching me applied MicroStrategy skills. I am also grateful to Neil Mehta for assembling the team together. I thank Dmitry Anoshin for being a great team leader, and a whip. I also thank Himani Jaswal for her help, Riddhi Tuljapurkar and Pranav Kukreti for giving me comments and for their amazing patience.
About the Reviewer
Felipe Vilela has worked for many years with system development, and then started working with BI/DW mainly using MicroStrategy. He worked with many companies in Brazil and the United States, implementing MicroStrategy projects, customizing and administrating the tool. He taught BI/DW and MicroStrategy to many companies using the company’s courses and MicroStrategy’s official courses. He also has a blog (www.vilelamstr.com) and is a guru in the MicroStrategy official community, Guru. He was one of the developers of MicroStrategy’s official app for MicroStrategy World 2016 Miami and he has the MicroStrategy’s MCEP certification.
First, I would like to thank God, who is my father and savior; my wife, who I love so much; my family, who are always there for me; and my friends.
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Preface
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.
What this book covers
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, MicroStrategyTroubleshooting, cover the best way of shooting any issues with the MicroStrategy platform using logs and many other things.
What you need for this book
For this book is good to have laptop or desktop. Moreover, you should have access to the Internet in order to download software. In addition, this book requires deploying a virtual machine with Linux. It is good to have some Linux knowledge. Finally, it is good to have at least 8 GB of RAM.
Who this book is for
This book is intended for Business Intelligence, data warehouse workers, ETL developers, managers, and analysts who use MicroStrategy in their daily work, and for business users who desire to make the best use of their enterprise information asset.
We highly recommend this book to anyone who is just starting out in BI, who has experience with other analytics platforms and BI fundamentals, or just wants to understand the entire BI implementation from start to finish in a complete, detailed and comprehensive fashion. In addition, it is a good knowledge base for decision makers to determine the value of using BI within their company. Hands-on practical examples, real-world scenarios, and best practices make this book an essential guide for mastering MicroStrategy 10.
Conventions
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Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Let's download distributive 10.2.0008.0052_10.2_GA_Linux.tar and put it on the virtual machine with Linux 10.2.0008.0052_10.2_GA_Linux.tar."
A block of code is set as follows:
<%--Adding panel around the new report bean for the second report --%> <br><br> <web:panel name="report2Panel" language="1" useImage="true">Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ pip install packagenameNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Select the Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) entry and then click the Properties button."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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To send us general feedback, simply e-mail [email protected], and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.
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Downloading the color images of this book
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Errata
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Questions
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Chapter 1. Getting Started with MicroStrategy
The modern market for Business Intelligence (BI) tools is full of various products with different advantages and disadvantages. For example, some of them are easy to deploy but hard to maintain. Another has strong data discovery capabilities but restricted data governance and struggles with complex enterprise data models. MicroStrategy 10 is one of the leading platforms on the market, can handle all data analytics demands, and offers a powerful solution. It combines self-service BI, data discovery and preparation, and big data exploration, bringing the vision of a single-vendor solution within reach of BI and analytics leaders. It combines data discovery and enterprise BI in a single platform, allowing organizations to invest in a single vendor that provides both agile self-service BI and traditional reporting, with integration between the two.
This chapter will cover:
Modern BI
According to a Gartner survey conducted among 2,800 CIOs of top companies, BI and analytics remain the number one investment priority. MicroStrategy has done a great job since 1991. MicroStrategy is a leader in Enterprise BI and can handle the modern demand for BI and analytics.
MicroStrategy 10 can easily handle modern hot topics such as big data analytics, predictive analytics, and mobile analytics. It is easily scalable and secure.
The main roles of BI are to discover new opportunities, improve processes, help to make the right decisions at the right time and reduce operational costs. As a result, BI tools should improve business performance and help to meet organizational goals, such as higher revenue, lower costs, and decreased risks.
BI market
Nowadays, we see lots of BI tools. Sometimes, we have to ask "What is the best BI tool?" In order to find the answer, we can look at reports from two main analytical agencies: Gartner and Forrester. Here is the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI & Analytics Platforms for 2015:
This quadrant shows us the leaders in the market. But do not trust this rating, because it is a kind of marketing. The best way to understand the pros and cons of any BI tool is practically; just download and install a trial version and play with it. Most tools, especially the leading ones, have common functionality or similar features. A good example is the interface of Tableau. It is so good that other companies have tried to reproduce it in their own products.
Maturity level of the organization
Every organization uses BI. The question is, just how good are they? Even if the organization does not have BI at all, it at least uses spreadsheets to consolidate numbers. This is also a kind of BI. We can observe many levels of BI maturity. Let us try to demonstrate this, based on four phases shown here:
The first phase is Scattered Reporting, in other words, the organization doesn't have any BI solution and even doesn't try one. Various departments grab data from transaction systems and try to figure out what's going on. We see this situation especially in startups or small companies. It is the most inefficient way to measure business and make decisions.
Tip
If you are at the beginning of your analytics journey, then we highly recommend you meet Lean Analytics methodology.
The next phase is Centralized BI Solution. It is the most common approach nowadays, when organizations build corporate data warehouses, integrate data from internal sources and systems, deploy a BI solution, and try to force everyone to use a single point of truth. It is a long journey to leave this phase, and sometimes it is an endless process because business constantly changes.
The third phase is Big Data Analytics. Despite the fact that the term big data is almost gone, we still use it, because it is a very popular phrase that means lots of unstructured data such as social data, open source data, and so on. In other words, organizations try to enrich their internal data in order to find more insights. As a result, companies are forced to use new technologies such as Hadoop or NoSQL datastores. In addition, companies start to use machine learning technologies and try to make them part of their BI framework.
The last phase is Real-time Mobile Business Insight. This phase means that finally organizations can focus on the speed of delivery of business insights, their mobility, and predictive capabilities.
Of course, this maturity model is not standard, we just tried to structure BI maturity levels based on our experience. MicroStrategy can handle even the final phase, a real competitive advantage.
