Best Practices for Importing Data from a File

Consider the following best practices for importing data from a file into MicroStrategy Web.

If you are importing data from a file that contains cross-tabbed data, be sure to appropriately highlight and specify the cells that contain your metric data, attribute element data, and the names of metric headers, as described in Importing Data from a File on Your Computer or Network.

You can import data from files on your computer or a shared location using a Windows file path. Specifying the location of your file as a Windows file path allows you to easily update your imported data, without having to manually upload the file each time you update it. You can import data from a file:

On your computer, using the format file:///Path/FileName, where Path is the file path in which the file is located and FileName is the name of the file.
In a shared location, using the format file://ComputerName/Path/FileName, where ComputerName is the name of the machine on which the file is located, Path is the file path in which the file is located, and FileName is the name of the file.

You can import data from HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP URLs. Basic authentication is supported during the import process for HTTPS and FTP URLs. To support basic authentication, the user name and password must be included as part of the URL. You can include port information in URLs. Question marks in URLs are not supported.

Ensure your data meets the following requirements:

Your data must be in .xls, .xlsx, .csv, or .txt file format.
In .xls, .xlsx, or .csv files, determine whether the data for a column is numeric or textual. If a column contains any non-numeric values in its cells, specify a text data type. If all values in the column are numeric, specify a numeric date type.
The first worksheet in an .xls or .xlsx file cannot be empty.
Both .txt and .csv files must contain comma-separated values and use either UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32 encoding.
.csv files can only contain one worksheet.
Leave cells empty to represent NULL values

Ensure your data does not exceed the following maximum file sizes:

File from disk: 4G
File from URL: Unlimited
Excel file: 800M
Text and CSV files: Varies depending on the Intelligence Server memory

MicroStrategy tested on an Intelligence Server instance with 32 vCPUs 256 GB of memory, importing 10x UB data (about a 11G CSV file) from URL. This took up approximately 45G of memory.

Best Practices for Importing Data from a File

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