MicroStrategy Announces DSS Agent 3.0; First True Relational OLAP Interface for Enterprise-Wide Decision Support Applications

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 DSS Agent 3.0, the first On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) tool for conducting OLAP analyses directly against a relational warehouse without any constraints on the number of dimensions, database size, analytical complexity, or number and type of users. DSS Agent 3.0 adds new functionality, including support for normalized metric calculations, workflow triggers, custom grouping, and other features that provide organizations with an unmatched level of analytical power and flexibility for developing enterprise-wide DSS applications.

DSS Agent 3.0 builds on version 2.0's unique feature set and sophisticated analysis functionality, including Data Surfing, Alerts, Intelligent Agents, Drill Down, and complex filtering for providing end-user access to information for analysis, presentation, integration, and action. The 3.0 version contains several new features designed to enhance the development and maintainability of powerful DSS applications.

"DSS Agent enables more analytical power to be distributed through the organization by providing end users with a palette of multidimensional objects, making advanced data mining and ad hoc OLAP analysis capabilities directly against relational databases possible. By utilizing these objects, organizations can create DSS applications of unmatched sophistication and flexibility," said Stephen Trundle, MicroStrategy's director of technology.

"MicroStrategy's implementation of an OLAP tool that accesses relational technology positions it to take advantage of the inroads RDBMS vendors have made in scaling up to very large data warehouses," said Karen Rubenstrunk, senior research analyst with The META Group. "DSS Agent 3.0 should be considered by corporations seeking data warehousing/OLAP products that will provide them with the next competitive advantage."

New Features:

Metric Builder

DSS Agent enables organizations to perform advanced OLAP calculations directly against industry-standard relational databases. These types of complex OLAP queries previously have only been possible through the use of proprietary multidimensional systems. DSS Agent supports multi-level metrics such as contribution, penetration, market share, and this period vs. last period. Because these metrics are dynamically calculated and not pre-stored in dimensional cubes, they can be generated for any appropriate business dimension, down to the atomic level. With DSS Agent's metric builder, new and more sophisticated metrics can always be calculated from existing ones by using standard mathematical operators. As there is no need to pre-store these metrics in the data warehouse, end users can define complex metrics using the existing simple metrics as a foundation. Metrics such as sales revenue, sales units and cost, as well as business entities such as item, region, store, and date are easily specified and displayed in a conventional column format. DSS Agent enables the easy analysis of non-aggregatable metrics, such as inventory levels, turnover, sell-through, and reorder quantities. These metrics represent challenges to traditional query tools because they cannot be summed along certain dimensions (for example, time).

Data Mining

DSS Agent contains features which enhance an end-user's ability to conduct data mining and market segmentation analyses. Qualities are a new type of analysis object that remove earlier limitations on the type of characteristics used in a report. Qualities provide exceptional power for organizations interested in data mining because they are extremely flexible, can be text or numeric, and can be aggregated without specific relation tables. With DSS Agent's Count feature, users can quickly target specific subsets of the data warehouse. Counts let users iterate more quickly through an analysis by bringing back the size of the result set before time consuming calculations are executed and the entire result set is returned. DSS Agent's data mining features allow organizations to refine large, unmanageable sets of data into meaningful groups of information, which can then be used for identifying trends, buying habits and customer behavior.

Workflow Triggers

DSS Agent is the first tool to incorporate workflow triggers. Workflow triggers let users start another work process with data returned from a DSS Agent query. DSS Agent reports can be defined to initiate statistical analysis, scenario analysis, production planning and other applications, allowing the user to not only access the other applications, but to use the most current data from their warehouse.

AutoPrompting

AutoPrompting allows users to dynamically select filtering criteria for a specific report. The AutoPrompt functionality is ideal for the less technical, high-level user as it leads users through each of the criteria selection steps involved in creating a report. Users are prompted to select specific filtering criteria from each of the business dimensions, and to combine them graphically using standard filtering operators (AND, OR, NOT).