MicroStrategy - Intelligent Cubes

When we run the reports created in MicroStrategy, they fetch the data from the warehouse to apply the calculations and generate a report. When multiple users request for the same report but with different range of values or different filter conditions, then the warehouse has to repeat similar calculations for each of the report and this hits the performance.

To avoid this, MicroStrategy uses intelligent cubes, which is an object sitting in the middle layer between reports and the warehouse.

The following diagram depicts the role of the intelligent cube.

The Intelligent Cube is shared as a single in-memory copy, among the different reports created by many users. A set of data is returned from the data warehouse and saved directly to the Intelligence Server memory. Multiple reports are built that gather data from the Intelligent Cube instead of querying the data warehouse.

Following are the features, which make intelligent cubes useful.

• Supports dynamic aggregation.
• Can be scheduled for refresh.
• Supports derived metric creation.
• Faster performance than directly querying warehouse.
• More than one cube can be used in a single dashboard.