• Deliver enterprise BI with higher performance and efficiency
  • Develop and deploy departmental BI applications quickly
  • Migrate seamlessly from departmental BI to enterprise BI

MicroStrategy 9: MultiSource Option

Distribution Services  /  MultiSource Option  /  OLAP Services

MicroStrategy MultiSource Option

Report, analyze, and monitor data across multiple sources through a single business model

MicroStrategy MultiSource Option is a new and fully integrated add-on component of MicroStrategy Intelligence Server. BI architects and developers can now build a single multidimensional model spanning multiple data sources including data warehouses, datamarts, operational databases, and departmental databases. Since MultiSource Option is completely transparent to users and developers, they have a unified view of the business, regardless of the underlying data stores.

MicroStrategy MultiSource Option represents the next logical evolution of MicroStrategy ROLAP technology, extending its unparallel scalability, analytical depth and query performance to heterogeneous data source environments.

Features at a glance

  • Provides a single multidimensional business model across multiple data sources
  • Fully leverages MicroStrategy central metadata repository for fastest development and maximum reusability
  • Extends seamless drill-through capabilities to the full depth and breadth of multiple databases
  • Generates optimized SQL for each specific database
  • Aggregate-aware engine dynamically selects optimal data sources to ensure superior query performance
  • Multi-pass SQL engine resolves complex queries across many databases
  • Push-down architecture automatically chooses the optimum database server for joining data from multiple sources resulting in minimum data movement across the network

Benefits at a glance

  • Quickly develop fully reusable business intelligence reports, dashboards, and applications even if data is located in disparate sources
  • Lower the cost of BI by gradually evolving to an Enterprise BI architecture
  • Allow users to seamlessly explore any data regardless of its location
  • Interact with reports, dashboards and OLAP grids similar to single-source ROLAP engine
  • Offload simple queries to less expensive databases
  • Increase the richness, relevance and value of any report or dashboard by incorporating more data from many sources

Gradual Evolution to Enterprise BI

MicroStrategy MultiSource Option effectively lowers the cost of BI by allowing companies to gradually evolve from islands of BI to Enterprise BI architecture. Companies can start deploying quick strike reports, dashboards, and even entire BI applications in minimal time, while leaving data in its disparate sources. As the data is gradually moved into the data warehouse, the MicroStrategy multi-dimensional model can simply be “re-pointed” to the data’s new source, and all objects can be reused, making reports and dashboards available without changing any component.

Transparent Data Integration

MicroStrategy MultiSource Option seamlessly extends the capabilities of MicroStrategy’s ROLAP architecture, providing a completely transparent experience to users and developers. With MicroStrategy MultiSource Option, users do not need to be aware of where data resides. All user interaction with reports, dashboards, and OLAP grids works seamlessly against one or many data sources. Furthermore, designers and users can create reports and dashboards using a consolidated view of key performance indicators and business attributes.

Seamless Data Exploration for In-depth Analysis

MicroStrategy MultiSource Option allows users to seamlessly drill across and throughout multiple databases and analyze any information they need, regardless of where the data is stored. MicroStrategy architecture uses a single unified metadata model for all 5 styles of BI which ensures that all reports, dashboards, and OLAP analyses are entirely consistent with one another, promoting a single version of the truth across the enterprise.

High Performance with Minimal Data Movement

MicroStrategy 9 employs a “push-down architecture” for joining data across multiple database servers. Many BI technologies require tremendous amounts of data movement since they join data in a middle-tier. In contrast, MicroStrategy SQL Engine generates highly optimized multi-pass SQL for each RDBMS and pushes processes and calculations down to the database level. This architecture is much more efficient than mid-tier joins since it requires much less server capacity, minimizes the movement of data across the network, and uses database engines that are far more optimized for high-volume join tasks.

User Empowerment through Self-Service

The MultiSource Option empowers users by providing access to real-time and historical data on a single report or dashboard. Since access to multiple data sources is easy and transparent, users can create more sophisticated dashboards and reports making them richer, more relevant, and highly valuable.