Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook

Using Metric Join Type in reports

We left the previous recipe with a doubt: where have all the numbers gone? We added the Year attribute to the report and the overall reseller sales dropped from 80 million to 32 million. No mystery, it's the standard way of joining metrics. The metrics on a grid are INNER joined. What does that mean? And most important, who told MicroStrategy to do so? That means that we have a first metric with values for 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, then we have a second metric—filtered on a promotion—that only has data for the year 2007, because that promotion was limited in time during 2007. During the creation of the grid the two metrics are joined on the Year attribute, resulting in a single-row report. Let's see how to avoid ...