Introduction

This book is intended for Business Intelligence (BI) developers who want to expand their knowledge in a technology that is in huge demand at the moment, and for advanced data analysts who are evaluating different technologies. In this first chapter, we will start by downloading and installing the software and a well-known sample SQL Server database. You do not need to be a SQL rock star to read this book, yet some concepts, such as foreign keys or many-to-many relationships, are taken for granted.

Having previous basic knowledge about dimensional modeling (fact tables and dimensions) will also help the comprehension.

The chapters are ordered by increasing difficulties, and each one builds on the top of the preceding, so the learning is progressive; you'll get the most out of it, if you follow the recipes one after the other.

You may already have a working MicroStrategy environment; if so, you can just install the example database and skip the rest of this chapter. However, I suggest using a dedicated installation to follow the recipes; it would be easier and cleaner.

These initial recipes may seem too easy for the more experienced BI specialists, I apologize for that; I only want to be sure that starting from Chapter 2, The First Steps in a MicroStrategy Project, everyone has a common setup.

Note

The operating system installation is outside the scope of this book; nevertheless, it is of vital importance that the machine where you will be doing the exercises is correctly configured and loaded with everything we will need. Throughout the course of this book, I will use Windows 2008 Web Server SP2; I have a VMware virtual machine with 2 GB RAM and two cores. The operating system is 32 bits. You may follow the whole book with a 64-bit software, but the examples and the instructions are written and tested on a 32-bit system. While this is a very small setup for a BI machine, it is enough to start.