MicroStrategy ONE

Data Population for Reports

The Data population for reports VLDB property allows you to define if and how report data is normalized to save memory resources.

When a report is executed, the description information for the attributes (all data mapped to non-ID attribute forms) included on the report is repeated for every row. For example, a report includes the attributes Region and Store, with each region having one or more stores. Without performing normalization, the description information for the Region attribute would be repeated for every store. If the South region included five stores, then the information for South would be repeated five times.

You can avoid this duplication of data by normalizing the report data. In this scenario, the South region description information would only be stored once even though the region contains five stores. While this saves memory resources, the act of normalization requires some processing time. This VLDB property provides the following options to determine if and how report data is normalized:

  • Do not normalize report data (default): Report data is not normalized. While no extra processing is required to normalize the report data, the memory resources required for the report are larger than if normalization was performed. However, reports commonly do not return large result sets and thus do not suffer from performance issues related to this duplication of data. Therefore, this option is the default for all reports.
  • Normalize report data in Intelligence Server: Intelligence Server performs the report data normalization. This typically processes the normalization faster than the other normalization options, but also requires memory resources of Intelligence Server. This is a good option if report performance is the top priority.
  • The other options available for report data normalization all perform the normalization within the database. Therefore, these are all good options if the memory resources of Intelligence Server must be conserved.

    You can see improved performance with the database normalization techniques if the report is retrieving a large ratio of repeating data. However, normalizing data within the database is typically slower than normalizing the data in Intelligence Server. Each database normalization technique is described below:

    • Normalize report data in database using Intermediate Table Type: This option is no longer available. If you upgraded a project from version 9.0.0 and this option was in use, this option is still used until you manually select a different option. Once you select a different option, you cannot revert to the behavior for this option.

      If you used this option in 9.0.0 and have upgraded to the most recent version of MicroStrategy, it is recommended that you use a different report data normalization technique. If the user account for the data warehouse has permissions to create tables, switch to the option Normalize report data in the database. This option is described below. If the user account does not have permissions to create tables, switch to the option Normalize report data in Intelligence Server.

    • Normalize report data in the database: This database normalization is a good option if attribute data and fact data are stored in the same table.

      To use this option, the user account for the database must have permissions to create tables.

    • Normalize report data in the database using relationship tables: This database normalization is a good option if attribute data and fact data are stored in separate tables.

      To use this option, the user account for the database must have permissions to create tables.

Levels at Which You Can Set This

Database instance, report, and template