The Context of Your Business Data: Attributes

Business data represented by facts can offer little insight without the presence of business concepts and context, which take the form of attributes in MicroStrategy. Attributes provide the business model with a context in which to report on and analyze facts. While knowing your company's total sales is useful, knowing where and when the sales took place provides the kind of analytical depth users require on a daily basis.

For example, you have a report with the Month, Year, and Region attributes on the template, as well as a Revenue metric based on the Revenue fact. When executed, the report displays your company's revenue at the region, month, and year levels. Because of the attributes on the report, a substantial amount of information is available, including which regions produced the least revenue and which years saw the highest growth in revenue. If you remove the attributes from the report, you can only find out how much revenue the company generated in total.