Strategy ONE

About MDX Cube Sources in Strategy

Many companies have stored data that is specifically structured for query, reporting, and analysis, known as a data warehouse, and they also have data stored in an MDX cube source such as SAP Business Intelligence Warehouse (SAP BW), Microsoft Analysis Services (Analysis Services), Oracle Essbase, or IBM Cognos TM1 (TM1). This system setup requires an integrated business intelligence system (BI), such as Strategy , that can concurrently access both the MDX cube source and the data warehouse effectively.

Strategy provides a rich set of functionalities ranging from OLAP Services and Report Services to Narrowcast capabilities, all of which can be exposed in a unified Web interface. Using the Strategy standard interface, Intelligence Server can join data from different MDX cube sources, in addition to relational databases, and bring the data into one cohesive user community known as a Strategy project. These additional MDX cube sources include the following:

  • SAP BW 7.3, and 7.4
  • Microsoft Analysis Services 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019, and Azure
  • You can also use Microsoft Analysis Services 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019, and Azure in Tabular Mode using InMemory as the query mode.
  • For purposes of integrating with Strategy, these versions of Microsoft Analysis Services provide the same features and functionality.
  • Oracle Essbase Server 11.1.2
  • IBM Cognos TM1 10.1.1 and 10.2

Strategy integration with MDX cube sources does not change the overall structure of Strategy software. Rather, integration allows Strategy to gain additional data sources for analysis, treating each as a data source to be used in MicroStrategy Strategy for query, reporting, and analysis.

This section builds on basic knowledge of Strategy and MDX cube source terminology and architecture. It describes how Strategy Intelligence Server converts MDX cube source data and objects into Strategy using MultiDimensional Expressions (MDX). SAP BW obtains data from R/3, CRM, SEM, or another SAP data source system. This data is stored in cubes or other SAP objects. Likewise, Analysis Services, Oracle Essbase, and TM1 store data in cubes obtained from various sources. To access the data and convert it into Strategy standard objects and conventions, Intelligence Server generates MDX. Defined by Microsoft, MDX is similar to SQL but is used to query cubes. An MDX expression returns a multidimensional result set (dataset) that consists of axis data, cell data, and properties data. For more information on MDX syntax, visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/ and search for MDX.

If you use MDX cube sources and Strategy as your combined BI solution, you can get the best out of both, including the following:

  • Access to MDX cube sources and a regular data warehouse
  • Five styles of BI
  • Custom development of reports and applications
  • Transaction-level analysis
  • Integration with other systems via Web Services

If you upgrade a pre-9.0 Strategy project that includes MDX cubes, see the Upgrade Help for information on updating MDX objects to enhance the performance of using these objects in Strategy .

For troubleshooting and diagnostics logging routines related to MDX cube sources, see the Troubleshooting section of the System Administration Help.