MicroStrategy Interview Questions
General Questions:
- Describe your previous experience and the projects you worked on.
- Describe your expertise, your strengths and your weaknesses.
- What databases have you worked on?
- What is the database size that you dealed with? What is the max size of the database that you worked on?
- Comfort level on SQL
- How to tune a report SQL.
- Troubling shooting an issue.
- How to you handle the migration process
- What is the documentation process that you prefer or followed in the past.
- Any experience interacting with Business Users?
- Any experience in gathering requirements?
- Do you have experience training end users.
- When a users reports an issue and complains about the performance, how would you handle this, explain in detail.
- Common User issues that you have experienced?
- What versions of MicroStrategy have you worked on? What do you like in the latest version?
- Tell me one of your favorite feature of MicroStrategy and why do you like it.
- What is your current team size.
- If you have multiple architects working on same projects, how do you make sure that both of them are not modifying the schema at a time.
- How many users did you support?
- Describe your experience with NC. List some common issues.
Adminstration & Narrowcast
- What is metadata?
- Explain 2-tier and 3-tier Architecture in MSTR.
- What is ScanMD and MD Doctor?
- What is clustering and types of clustering?
- How did you achieve or document schema object version control at your previous clients?
- What are different modes you can run I-Server?
- How can you make sure that I-Server would be running even if the application mode has crashed and how to get back the instance?
- What are various authentication modes?
- What will you do when I-Server crashes?
- Where is Administrator’s password stored? Is it encrypted? How will you reset password of all users?
- What will you do if your Administrator has forgotten password or the account is locked?
- How can you monitor the error received while running I-Server and report?
- What are the features available for MSTR Intelligence Server?
- When you wanted to compare two projects in MSTR. What are the tools available and what would you use?
- What is the use of command manager?
- Types of caches and where are they stored?
- Where and how are the report caches saved? When are they used?
- On what operating systems can MicroStrategy run?
- Have you done any customizations of the tool, if so please describe.
- What types of services have you built in Narrowcast.
- What is the difference between PPE (Personalized Page Execution) and PRE (Personalized Report Execution)?
Architect and Report Development
- What are Factless facts?
- Difference between Star schema and Snowflake schema. And what is best suited for MicroStrategy
- What is the difference between view and materialized view?
- What are OLAP Services. Define couple of them.
- What’s fact table, dimension table and relate table?
- Should you have DATE as ID attribute form?
- What is compound key?
- What is a relationship table?
- How will you resolve double counting in M-M relationship between two attributes?
- What is the difference between RSD document and HTML document?
- Have you worked on flash dashboards? Explain few feature of flash?
- What are Transformations? Are there any transformations implemented in your project? Explain an example from your project.
- Explain Level Metrics. How it is used in your project?
- Explain Fact Degradation.
- Difference between View Filter and Report Filter.
- Explain custom groups and consolidations and the difference between them.
- Explain few VLDB properties that you have used in the past and the reason behind them.
- What is a role attribute?
- What are different null which can occur in a report and how do you mask them?
- Talk about best practices in creating dashboards and reports
Database Related
- What is a surrogate key? Difference between a primary key and a surrogate key.
- Why do we use a staging area?
- Why do we use dimensional modeling in DW? Why not Relational?
- What are conformed dimensions?