Version 2021

Creating Transformations to Define Time-Based and Other Comparisons

Suppose you want to compare how much revenue your company grew last year to how much it grew this year. This type of analysis, called a TY/LY comparison (This Year versus Last Year), is a commonly used form of time-series analysis and is relevant to many different industries, including retail, banking, and telecommunications.

Transformations—schema objects you can create using attributes in your project—are one of the many MicroStrategy techniques used to perform time-series analysis.

To calculate a variance or a growth percentage such as last year's revenue versus this year's revenue, it is very convenient to use a transformation. Transformations are often the most generic approach and can be reused and applied to other time-series analyses. To use a transformation, a report designer creates a metric and applies the transformation to it.

Transformation-style analysis can also be supported using the Lag and Lead functions provided with MicroStrategy. These functions can be used to define metrics that compare values from different time periods without the use of transformations. For information on using these functions to support transformation-style analysis, see the Functions Reference.

This chapter discusses the different types of transformations and how to create them. It is assumed that you have some understanding of what metrics are, as transformation metrics are discussed in this chapter. For information on metrics and using transformations in metrics and reports, see the Metrics chapter of the Advanced Reporting Help.