What MicroStrategy Does
MicroStrategy’s flagship platform is built to enable businesses to connect to various data sources, analyze data, and present insights through interactive and intuitive tools. The platform is geared towards both business users and BI professionals, facilitating tasks such as data discovery, data wrangling, data visualization, and advanced big data analytics.
Key Features and Functionality
Data Connectivity and Integration
MicroStrategy can connect to a wide range of data sources, including relational databases, flat files, big data sources like Hadoop, social media platforms, and cloud systems. It provides certified drivers to access big data sources, ensuring high performance and optimized connectivity.
Data Discovery and Wrangling
The platform includes robust data discovery features that allow users to blend data from multiple sources. It also offers extensive data wrangling capabilities, including automatic recommendations and history scripts to remember data transformations, making it easier for business users and data scientists to prepare data for analysis.
Analytics and Visualization
MicroStrategy boasts a library of over 300 OLAP, mathematical, financial, and data mining functions. This enables users to create business metrics, KPIs, and advanced statistical analyses. The platform supports various visualization types, including dashboards, scorecards, ad hoc queries, and highly formatted reports. It also integrates with third-party analytics tools like Tableau and Power BI.
Relational Online Analytical Processing (ROLAP) Architecture
Unlike traditional MOLAP architectures, MicroStrategy’s ROLAP architecture allows users to “drill anywhere” in the entire relational database, down to the transactional level of detail. This enables the use of a virtual multidimensional cube structure, making complex relational databases easier to navigate.
AI and Automation
MicroStrategy incorporates advanced AI capabilities, such as Auto Answers and Bots, which can answer complex, multi-faceted questions and provide natural language summaries of dashboard pages. The AI features learn from user feedback and adapt to individual user preferences, enhancing the chat-based analytic experience.
Cloud and Deployment Options
The platform can be deployed on-premises with Windows or Linux servers or as a service in the AWS or Microsoft Azure clouds. Users can access MicroStrategy applications via the web, Windows, Mac, and mobile devices.
Security and Administration
MicroStrategy includes robust security features, such as authentication, authorization, and internationalization. It also supports multiple OIDC and SAML configurations for different identity providers and identity access management systems. The platform offers tools for monitoring, management, and statistics collection, as well as features like persistent notifications and enhanced language preferences.
Customization and Integration
The platform provides a software developer kit (SDK) and APIs to customize applications and integrate them with other tools. It supports integration with enterprise mobility management solutions and physical access control systems, and allows users to build transaction-enabled analytics apps with code-free development tools.
In summary, MicroStrategy is a powerful BI platform that offers a wide range of features and functionalities to help organizations analyze, visualize, and act on their data, making it a versatile tool for business intelligence and data-driven decision-making.