Understanding your data sources

With MicroStrategy, you can report on and analyze your organization's data with the goal of answering your business questions. MicroStrategy makes sense of the large amounts of data stored in your data source and returns report results which reflect that data. A data source can be a data warehouse, a simple text file, a Microsoft Excel file, or an external data source such as SAP-BW, Microsoft Analysis Services, or Hyperion Essbase.

No matter which type of data source your organization uses, data sources are commonly separated into specific business divisions. For example, you might have a data source that only holds information related to your supply chain data, storing all data related to monitoring the efficiency of your business workflow. Your organization might also have a separate data source to store all human resources data such as employee headcount, employee turnover, and so on.

It is important to know which data source(s) you are regularly accessing when you execute reports. By knowing which data sources are providing you with your report data, you can learn how frequently they are updated with new data. This information in turn can help you decide how often you need to re-execute certain reports, making sure that the report query is submitted through your data source rather than through a stored report cache in MicroStrategy.