Cognos V/s Microstrategy

Hi Guys,

We have seen lot of post on web on Microstrategy V/S Cognos, Saying why Microstrategy is better and all that .Now recently i got a chance to make a POC in microstrategy .

In involves creation on dashboard in MSTR.So i learned a lot from that.What is different in MSTR from Cognos .How it works and What are some of feature missing in it from Cognos .

Disclaimer - Below thought are my personal opinion based on my limited Knowledge of MSTR.

I will also be posting a article titles .MSTR for Cognos developers .

Below are some of the points 

FM in Cognos <---> Architect in MSTR

Major Disadvantages

Issue 1

Architect assumes that you have a star schema model in your database from which you are making  your report.Consider you have OLTP system and you are making report on that it will be next to impossible to do so in MSTR without going for cubes

Now i am not in favour of cubes due to their maintainance issues. Cognos allows you do all types of join in FM very very easily .Consider simple left outer join.Its very difficult to achieve in MSTR.

Issue 2 

MSTR will create temporary tables in your schema.you need to have a schema where you have create table priviledges.So you should have Schema A from where you access your main schema B .Because in schema A you will need priviledges to create tables .

Whereas in cognos you do not require write priviledges on your schema .All optimisation is handled by cognos server .

So MSTR will suggest to go for Cubes in order to improve performance in case of large data.

Issue 3

MSTR has something called Free Form sql .It allows you to write your own sql.But that is also very limited.You can have prompts in this but it does not allow you to change prompt values once report is run.

Consider below scenario .You have a cognos report in which you have a prompt on report page and not on prompt page .Like product name .You want to change the product name once report is run to see a different product .

In MSTR you cant pass prompt value to SQL again now becaue it has already retrieved teh data.Only way to do this is to rerun the report.Very sad .


Issue 4 

MSTR cannot handle factless fact queries . In Datawarehousing a big disadvantage .Consider you need to pull data from two dimensions without involving any fact .Then you cant do it in MSTR without involving a fact

I wont say MSTR is great for making reports .But it has very Good Dashboarding Capabilityand i am assuming that you are using cubes are source for those  dashboards.Good performance and a Lot of options


Now having said this Some Good points on MSTR

1) Its the King of dashboarding .Cognos has a limited dashboarding capability.Panels are fixed.In MSTR you can actually draw your dashboard how you want it like in paint.

2) It has lot of widgets for dashboard Fisheye , Timelines .Those capabilities are not there in cognos dashboards



I will continue to update more points as i come across .Do read my post on Microstrategy for Cognos developers .Explains components in MSTR and their Counterparts in Cognos

1) Bullet chart not available directly in MSTR.Need to do a lot of formating to make them appear as bullets

2) Left outer joins are not availabel directly in architect.

3) Does not do any server processing

4)Creates tables in oracle schema intermediate tables you should have create priviledges

5) The way it handles factless fact queries.If a fact is not there in a query it will give a crossjoin

6) you cannot have a prompt on report page .All prompts have to submitted before a report is run .you cant do any prompt based filtering once report is run