Intelligence Server Job Processing (Common to All Jobs)

Regardless of the type of request, Intelligence Server uses some common functionality to satisfy them. The following is a high-level overview of the processing that takes place.

A user makes a request from a client application such as MicroStrategy Web, which sends the request to Intelligence Server.
Intelligence Server determines what type of request it is and performs a variety of functions to prepare for processing.
Depending on the request type, a task list is composed that determines what tasks must be accomplished to complete the job, that is, what components the job has to use within the server that handle things like asking the user to respond to a prompt, retrieving information from the metadata repository, executing SQL against a database, and so on. Each type of request has a different set of tasks in the task list.
The components in Intelligence Server perform different tasks in the task list, such as querying the data warehouse, until a final result is achieved.
Those components are the stops the job makes in what is called a pipeline, a path that the job takes as Intelligence Server works on it.
The result is sent back to the client application, which presents the result to the user.

Most of the actual processing that takes place is done in steps 2 and 3 internally in Intelligence Server. Although the user request must be received and the final results must be delivered (steps 1 and 4), those are relatively simple tasks. It is more useful to explain how Intelligence Server works. Therefore, the rest of this section discusses Intelligence Server activity as it processes jobs. This includes:

Being familiar with this material should help you to understand and interpret statistics, Enterprise Manager reports, and other log files available in the system. This may help you to know where to look for bottlenecks in the system and how you can tune the system to minimize their effects.