Having had a little more exposure to the Microstrategy application stack, specifically Version 8, I find they are fairly similar platforms. The differences end up being how to create Microstrategy (MSTR) Projects, which are essentially Logical Models within the Business layer in OBIEE. Metrics & Facts take on slightly different meanings within the MSTR world as they are fairly flexible in nature. The organization of things in multiple folders within an MSTR Project is a little daunting and confusing at first but makes some sense if you just focus on everything relative to the Project itself. If you extend the concept of MSTR Projects to a single OBIEE Subject Area, then you can make the association.

The MSTR analytical engine is fairly similar in that it will try to determine the most optimal query to construct based on the definition of the MSTR Project objects. The architecture of the physical data model requires a little bit of a different approach.

One thing I started to investigate was the fact that Microstrategy likes to snowflake tables off dimensions. This is a little different than the nearly complete normalization of dimension tables within the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse data model. I'm going under limited exposure on the reasons behind this but I believe there are cases where snowflaking, let's say, a type table off a dimension may lead to some design approaches to the fact that that make it easier later on to create aggregates that join to the snowflake table at a higher level of granularity than referencing the dimension table. The MSTR analytical engine chooses the approach table to join to the proper granular fact table through its own implementation of aggregate awareness.

OBIEE has had aggregate awareness for quite some time now (at least 5 years) within its main server engine. It also was a little more intuitive to define at which level of granularity the Logical Table Sources were defined for and referencing the appropriate hierarchy column within a dimension to determine which LTS to query against. If an appropriate column within the normalized dimension table exists to join to the aggregated fact table, this design decision allows OBIEE to implement aggregate awareness in a much more efficient manner.

I'll dig more into how the Microstrategy analytical engine handles this with the configuration in the Project.

Another difference is that the metadata resides within its own schema whereas the OBIEE metadata resides in a single file. There are pros and cons in both methods. With an older BI platform product I worked on over 10 years ago called Information Advantage DecisionSuite (RIP IA!), it was very similar to what Microstrategy's approach is in terms of centralizing the metadata storage in a database schema. Migrations with metadata stored in a file vs a database means that it is a little more cumbersome to conduct within Microstrategy. In OBIEE, it requires copying a single file into the target server. Within Microstrategy, the Object Manager needs to push the changes from one environment to another, meaning that it needs to do database reads and writes from one metadata schema to another, in another database as well (if you architect it according to best practices and separate the target server metadata in another schema or database instance altogether). This, however, ensures that proper measures and checks & balances are done via the platform to preserve the integrity of the metadata components.

I'll post some more thoughts as I come across them. Feel free to poke holes in my observations though and comment on the comparisons. More to come!

I recently took a new position at a company as a Full Time Employee (FTE as we're called now ), ditching the consultant life of going from one client to another, and trying to take what I've learned and experienced over the years with Business Intelligence and OBIEE and applying them to this company.

The platform they are using is Microstrategy, which as some of you (or most of you astute readers) will know to be one of the oldest ROLAP Business Intelligence tools in the market. It's on version 9 now so I'll have quite a bit of exposure to the Intelligence Server architecture, the platform itself, the Reporting engine and the Administration portion of it to compare with OBIEE's similar parallel offerings.

I've already noticed a few differences between the 2 platforms but am surprised at the amount of similarites. In the next several posts, I'll probably do some comparisons of the 2 platforms and invite comments about the pros and cons of each one of these comparisons.

All things being equal, OBIEE and Microstrategy aren't that far apart in terms of what they actually offer and provide businesses: the ability to visualize their data and gain value and insight into their organization in order to manage their business more effectively and efficiently. It's just in HOW they go about taking care of business that will be interesting to compare with.

Oh, and BTW, why aren't there more resources on Microstrategy (such as blogs and forums) than there are available for OBIEE?