Understanding MicroStrategy Architecture

The MicroStrategy platform offers OLAP Services, Report Services, and Narrowcast Server functionality, all of which can be accessed through MicroStrategy Web. Support for SAP BW, Analysis Services, Oracle Essbase, TM1, MicroStrategy Freeform SQL, and MicroStrategy Query Builder provides additional mechanisms for pulling data into the MicroStrategy platform for analysis, as illustrated in the diagram below.

For information on Freeform SQL and Query Builder reporting, see the Advanced Reporting Help.

Data is pulled from multiple MDX cube sources using MDX, and from operational systems using Freeform SQL or Query Builder. Once the data is retrieved, it is treated in the same manner as data pulled from a relational data warehouse. This means that core MicroStrategy reporting capabilities are available no matter what the original data source is.

MicroStrategy uses a repository known as a metadata, whose data associates the tables and columns of a data source with user-defined attributes and facts to enable the mapping of the business view, terms, and needs to the underlying database structure. You can have multiple MicroStrategy projects, each pointing to a data source. A database instance represents the connection to a data source, and one database instance could be referenced by multiple projects in a configuration. Each project contains a project schema, a set of tables and relationships that defined the logical model for that project.

To learn more about how MDX cube sources can be used in addition to a project schema, see The MicroStrategy Object Model.