What is Drilling?

After executing a report in a MicroStrategy reporting environment, a user may need to execute another report based on the original report to get more detailed or supplemental information. For example, after looking at annual sales of a certain city, she may want to look at the monthly sales for the same city. Alternatively, after noticing that a certain item had a very high profit margin, she may want to see if that is also true for the entire category of that item. Such actions where a user creates a related report based on an existing report are referred to as drilling.

Even though a report generated as a result of drilling is related to the original report, they are, in essence, two entirely different reports. This means that the two reports can be saved or changed independent of each other. The two reports are different either because they have different templates, different filters, or both.

To drill on a report, a user can right-click an object on the report and then select the direction and destination. However, he is restricted by any settings assigned to the object's drill map. To override the default settings for filters and parent, page-by, threshold, and subtotal display on the drilled-to report, a user can drill using the Drill dialog box, which is accessed from the Drill option on the Data menu. For drilling steps, see the MicroStrategy Developer help. For details and examples of these settings, see Drill Path Settings.