Saturday, December 26, 2009

MicroStrategy Free Reporting Suite - Installation Series

As many in the BI world know, MicroStrategy released a free version version of their reporting suite around mid 2009.  Looking at resources on the web, I haven’t really seen much with regard to setting the suite up using readily available (and mostly free) components. With the release of the MicroStrategy Free Reporting Suite, I think many organizations will be able to utilize the power of MicroStrategy at a substantially lower cost. That's where I think this series of tutorials will come in handy for not only the adventurous hobbyist, but also organizations and professionals looking for MicroStrategy resources.

These tutorials will be broken up into individual parts explaining the setup process from the base OS install, to firing the Intelligence Server up and connecting with a client.

To get started, let me first list out the base components that I’ll be using. I’m doing all of this on a MacBook with 4GB of ram. In the spirit of using free software, I’ll be using the latest release of VirtualBox to run the various VMs.

The components are as follows:

  • VirtualBox 3.1.2 (free)
    • All of our guest OS’s will be running on virtual machines. Setup on physical machines should be similar.
  • OpenSUSE 11.2 64-bit (free)
    • Will host our Intelligence Server Universal, Metadata, and Web Universal installs.
  • PostgreSQL 8.x (free)
    • Will hold our Intelligence Server metadata repository.
  • Apache2 + Tomcat6 (free)
    • Will run MicroStrategy Web Universal
  • Windows XP (NOT free)
    • Required to use MicroStrategy Desktop


Before you can proceed with the tutorials, obviously you'll need to have openSUSE downloaded. This can be obtained by going to the openSUSE 11.2 download page, selecting '64 bit', and pressing 'Download DVD'.

The other download that you'll obviously need is the MicroStrategy Free Reporting Suite package. For the purpose of these tutorials, you'll need to download the 64bit UNIX/Linux package specifically. To obtain, head on over to the Free Reporting Suite site and follow through the registration process. *Note, you'll need a "corporate" email address.

EDIT: An important disclaimer I'd like to place on this series: When deploying the MicroStrategy Suite in your environment, make sure you're using MicroStrategy supported components if you expect to receive support from MicroStrategy.  This series is posted as just an informative and educational series of steps to quickly deploy an environment with mostly free software.  This is not meant to replace the proper deployment steps in a production environment.

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