Hierarchy Drilling on MicroStrategy Dashboards/Mustafa Ali Khan(NALGAN)

Just wanted to summarize Hierarchy Drilling on dashboards –

MicroStrategy supports various drilling options – System Hierarchy, User Hierarchy, URL APIs, Drill Maps, etc. The mechanism of drilling works differently on reports and dashboard.

Hierarchy drilling is very well supported on reports. MicroStrategy defaults to System Hierarchy when there are no user hierarchies built. In case there are user hierarchies, they over write the system hierarchy w.r.t drilling.

In MicroStrategy version 9, drilling options are enhanced in dashboards. When a dataset is bought into a dashboard and placed as a grid, there are couple new options under Data > Grid Data Options > General, as shown below (below the respective grid).

When drilling is enabled, options can be set to “Drill Anywhere” or “Drill Within”.

What does “Drill Anywhere” do? – Users can drill on attributes on a dashboard (from grids/graphs) based on system/user hierarchy, MicroStrategy will open the original dataset and continue drilling on the report. Point to be noted is that, user is navigated away from the dashboard to be original dataset which is behind the dashboard.

What is “Drill Within” do? Obviously, every user wanted to drill within a dashboard, without navigating out of the dashboard. With the “Drill Within” option this is doable, but the destination drill objects should be included in the dataset. For example, if the user wanted to drill from Country to State in the grid, both the attributes should be in the dataset (not required to be in the grid of the dashboard). Performance should be considered while enabling this option.

Bottom line – drilling within a report on a dashboard is not dynamic yet. Meaning, when the dashboard is executed and a user prefers to drill only on one of the grids/graphs having the other remain as is, this is not possible without pre-loading the data into the dashboard/server.