MCLEAN, Va., April 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced a multi-year initiative to further improve the performance of its business intelligence platform.

MicroStrategy's high performance initiative includes the formation of its High Performance and Scalability Lab, the creation of a dedicated Performance Engineering team, and specific R&D efforts solely focused on providing MicroStrategy customers with the highest levels of performance for BI applications of all sizes.

With its new high performance initiative, MicroStrategy plans to:  

Deliver up to 10x faster BI applications

Today's BI applications must efficiently access terabytes and even petabytes of data. Since most competing BI tools do not include performance acceleration engines, average BI application query response times often range from 10 seconds to one minute or more. MicroStrategy's high performance initiative will set a new performance standard, aiming to deliver up to 10x faster query response time at any data scale.

Provide faster than 3-second response time for most predictable queries and analyses

MicroStrategy research has found that most business queries are predictable. Business people often run similar reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to understand operational performance. Using its In-memory technology to cache computations and place the results into server memory, MicroStrategy can dramatically accelerate repetitive operational reports as well as most subsequent analyses.

Provide faster than 5-second response time for the majority of ad hoc queries

By optimizing and accelerating all aspects of its BI platform, from SQL generation to SQL execution to data rendering, MicroStrategy seeks to enable 50% of all ad hoc queries to return in less than 5 seconds. Specific areas on which MicroStrategy's R&D efforts will focus include:

• Faster Database Queries – MicroStrategy's ROLAP technology leverages database engines for complex calculations and data joins, employing sophisticated techniques designed to reduce database processing time and optimize overall query performance, including:
  • Database optimizer-specific query generation. Each Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) utilizes strategies designed to maximize query performance. MicroStrategy generates highly optimized SQL that leverages each RDBMS's proprietary strategies, delivering the highest performance without additional costs.
  • Reducing the number of SQL passes. SQL generation algorithm optimizations can significantly reduce the number of SQL passes for sophisticated analyses involving complex metrics. This type of optimization can reduce database query time by as much as 75%.  
  • Balance workload across multiple databases. MicroStrategy's Multi-source ROLAP engine can be used to shift workload from high capacity, high cost database appliances to lower cost, general purpose databases. MicroStrategy's aggregate-aware engine automatically chooses the best data sources to maximize performance. By copying aggregate and lookup tables to fast, lower cost databases, MicroStrategy can preserve the larger database engines for more complex queries that require additional power.  
• Larger Data Caches − MicroStrategy is further enhancing its data caching algorithms to allow organizations to incorporate more data into memory within regular data loading windows. The latest enhancements in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 show performance improvements of over 30% in cache data load time.
• Faster Web Interactivity − Performance enhancements in this area focus on code optimizations that minimize data transfer, streamline processing, optimize page construction, render pages more quickly, and provide faster on-demand java-script loading within a Web 2.0 architecture. The objective is to continue to provide rich user interactivity with rapid performance on Web browsers and mobile devices.
• Faster Dashboards – MicroStrategy's dashboard technology has led to a new model of business information delivery called DashboardApps. These self-contained BI applications can contain an entire day's worth of information for BI users within a single dashboard and are tailored to non-traditional BI users who have little or no BI experience. Additional enhancements to MicroStrategy's dashboard technology will include on-demand data transfer technology, enhanced data compression algorithms, and optimized rendering algorithms to make dashboards faster and easier to use.

MicroStrategy also plans to support its high performance initiative with focused resources and programs:

MicroStrategy High Performance and Scalability Lab: MicroStrategy recently built a multi-million dollar state-of-the-art research laboratory equipped with the latest database hardware, software, and performance testing tools. MicroStrategy has designed multiple industry-specific data models and filled them with terabytes of data to simulate typical requirements of the largest and most demanding BI deployments.

MicroStrategy Performance Engineering Team: MicroStrategy established a dedicated team of performance engineers who work closely with selected customers to understand and document the current performance envelope of BI system configurations. This team runs hundreds of performance tests each week to identify and eliminate system bottlenecks, and build accurate system performance profiles.  In addition, the team is authoring tech notes, articles, and best practice documents to help customers maximize performance of their BI applications.

Professional Services: MicroStrategy is developing new consulting services to help customers build high performance BI applications as well as audit and fine-tune existing applications through:

• Capacity Planning -- A holistic approach to matching existing infrastructure to current and growing BI requirements, including a quantitative assessment of current system capacity and potential bottlenecks.
• High Performance Tuning -- A methodical approach to tuning MicroStrategy software for maximum performance, including all components of the BI ecosystem such as relational database management systems.

High Performance BI Webcast Series: MicroStrategy will offer a series of educational Webcasts with practical tips to enhance the performance of MicroStrategy BI applications. The Webcast series will provide key information on areas such as best practices to improve performance with MicroStrategy In-memory technology, VLDB settings and optimizations, caching strategies, configuration settings, aggregation techniques, optimum report and dashboard design, hardware considerations, and best practices for performance and stress testing.

MicroStrategy will launch its High Performance BI Webcast series, "Top 10 Ways to Optimize Performance with MicroStrategy" on May 6, 2010. The first one-hour Webcast will provide useful insights to extend performance levels and enhance the user experience. For more details, visit http://www.microstrategy.com/high-performance-BI.

"Companies are continually looking to expand their use of BI to improve the speed and quality of their business decisions," said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy COO. "While MicroStrategy is already known for its outstanding performance at the highest data scale, we are committed to pushing performance levels even higher and creating a new performance benchmark for the industry. With increased new BI applications and users, we view performance as critical to providing our customers with an exceptional user experience."

About MicroStrategy

Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology.  MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day.  Companies choose MicroStrategy for its ease-of-use, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability. MicroStrategy offers free reporting software that can be downloaded from its website, http://www.microstrategy.com/freereportingsoftware. More information about MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is available at www.microstrategy.com.

MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy 9, and MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries.  Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

This press release may include statements that may constitute "forward-looking statements," including statements relating to the development of new products, services or new product features, including the product features that we are seeking to develop as part of our high performance initiative, and statements containing the words "believe," "estimate," "project," "expect" or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements inherently involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results of MicroStrategy Incorporated and its subsidiaries (collectively, the "Company") to differ materially from the forward-looking statements.  Factors that could contribute to such differences include delays in our ability to develop and ship products and provide services containing the product features described in this press release and customer acceptance of any new or modified products and services that we may develop as a result of our high performance initiative.  By making these forward-looking statements, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this release.

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SOURCE MicroStrategy Incorporated