Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy

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.

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 techBI and publishes his presentations at SlideShare. 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.

Himani Rana is a senior data scientist and has been working as a 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 about MAZACORNET: Mobility aware zone based ant colony optimization routing for VANET on the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. 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 and 2011 Third International Conference on Advanced Computing (ICoAC)

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.