MicroStrategy ONE

Prerequisites to creating Intelligent Cubes

Make sure you review the following prerequisites before you create an Intelligent Cube in MicroStrategy. They can save you time and make your Intelligent Cubes more effective for your reporting environment:

  • Define your business query: Before you can determine what objects to place on an Intelligent Cube, you need to know what data you want to make available for reports to access directly. To define your Intelligent Cube, make sure you consider the following questions:

  • What subset of business queries does the Intelligent Cube need to provide data for? Intelligent Cubes allow you to create sets of data that can support multiple reports that answer variations to similar business queries.

    However, be aware that it is helpful to create Intelligent Cubes for logical subsets of your available data rather than creating larger Intelligent Cubes that contain data that is not needed together on a report. Creating Intelligent Cubes in this way can improve the performance of your Intelligent Cubes and make it easier to create reports that can access and use the available Intelligent Cubes.

  • Do you have reports that currently access your data warehouse that could benefit from accessing an Intelligent Cube instead? To support this scenario, you can use dynamic sourcing to connect these reports to Intelligent Cubes that you create. You can also use MicroStrategy Cube Advisor to create Intelligent Cubes that these reports can access. For information on using Cube Advisor to support dynamic sourcing, see Using Cube Advisor to support dynamic sourcing.

  • Look for existing Intelligent Cubes: Before you create an Intelligent Cube, search through MicroStrategy to see whether a similar Intelligent Cube already exists that can serve the same purpose as the Intelligent Cube that you intend to create. This can not only save you time, it can help you avoid unnecessary duplication in your MicroStrategy project. You can search a project for Intelligent Cubes, or you can view Intelligent Cubes created for your projects in the Intelligent Cube Monitor. For information on using the Intelligent Cube Monitor, see Managing Intelligent Cubes: Intelligent Cube Monitor in the System Administration Help .

  • Review the feature support for Intelligent Cubes: The MicroStrategy features that are available for Intelligent Cubes differ from those available for reports. To review this list, see Supporting various features with Intelligent Cubes.