MicroStrategy Announces True Relational OLAP Product Line; Provides Comprehensive Set of Tools for Building Data Warehouses and Decision Support Systems

Business Wire, August 8, 1995

VIENNA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 8, 1995--MicroStrategy, a leading provider of data warehouse and decision support solutions, today announced the release of its DSS Agent 3.0 product line which provides an entire suite of products to create, maintain, monitor and optimize data warehouse access. This complete solution includes new software products, technologies and services that enable organizations to create decision support applications of unmatched sophistication and flexibility and allow knowledge workers to effectively and efficiently access data warehouses up to a terabyte.

Continuing in its role as the industry leader, MicroStrategy has defined and developed the industry's first complete layered architecture for True Relational OLAP -- the ability to conduct OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) analyses directly against a relational warehouse without any constraints on the number of dimensions, database size, analytical complexity or the number and type of users.

"Relational OLAP architectures have changed the rules in the data access marketplace," said Michael J. Saylor, MicroStrategy's president and CEO. "There is a vacuum in this marketplace created by the inadequacies of the ad hoc SQL query tools and the proprietary multidimensional databases. True Relational OLAP evolves the best of both schools of thought to the next logical plateau -- enabling multidimensional querying against terabyte-sized relational databases."

Architecture Endorsed by Industry Analysts

"MicroStrategy's DSS Agent 3.0 product line represents the next logical step in the evolution of complex decision support tools. The products marry sophisticated OLAP with state-of-the-industry relational database technology in a powerful union called Relational OLAP," said Peter Kastner, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group.

DSS Agent 3.0 Product Line

By providing an integrated family of products, MicroStrategy's 3.0 product line dramatically accelerates the speed and the capabilities of organizations building data warehouses and decision support systems (DSS). The new product line includes functionality added to the 3.0 version of DSS Agent, MicroStrategy's relational OLAP interface; the release of DSS Server, an OLAP server that provides OLAP capabilities without imposing the limitations of proprietary multidimensional repositories; the release of DSS Architect, a development tool for defining a multidimensional model for data stored relationally in a data warehouse; and the release of DSS Executive, a design tool for building Executive Information Systems (EIS) on top of DSS Agent projects.

DSS Agent 3.0

DSS Agent is a True Relational OLAP interface which enables users to make critical business decisions by using advanced functionality such as Intelligent Agents, Data Surfing, Drill Down and Alerts. This latest version of DSS Agent contains several new features designed to enhance the development of enterprise-wide OLAP applications. Highlights of the new functionality include:

-- Support for normalized metric calculations that allow dynamically calculated multi-level metrics (like percent to total, market share and sell-through) directly from standard relational databases, previously possible only through proprietary multidimensional systems;

-- Workflow triggers that let users start another work process with data returned from a query, allowing DSS Agent reports to initiate statistical analysis, scenario analysis, production planning and other applications;

-- Custom Grouping, which allows user-defined and user-maintained ad hoc grouping of dimensions so that any combination of items can be displayed and analyzed in a single report; and

-- a scalable interface that makes DSS Agent the appropriate tool for meeting the full spectrum of DSS needs, ranging from ad hoc query analysis to structured DSS to high-level Executive Information Systems.

Other new features include AutoPrompting, E-mail enablement, new Calendar functionality, a new Filter editor, and new Report objects.

DSS Server 3.0

DSS Server is an advanced OLAP Server that gives users powerful OLAP capabilities against existing relational warehouses. DSS Server's three-tier architecture allows organizations to balance processing tasks across platforms, bringing a superior performance and scalability to enterprise-wide applications. DSS Server contains an expert SQL Query Engine which dynamically generates RDBMS-specific, performance-optimized SQL execution plans for user information requests. DSS Server includes a high-performance OLAP Engine which supports advanced OLAP metrics (for example, market share, penetration, this year vs. last year, etc.), previously only possible via proprietary multidimensional databases. DSS Server also provides a Rule-Based Query Governor, background processing, agent scheduling, and a programmable API. With DSS Server, end-user productivity is maximized because client machines are released for other tasks while DSS analyses are executed, warehouses are performance-tuned by using query transaction logs to determine warehouse utilization and patterns, and RDBMS processing is load-leveled.