Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook

Grouping at a different level (level metrics)

In every report we did until now, the numbers were always grouped by the attributes in the grid (Report Level). This means that a GROUP BY clause was added at the end of every SELECT including all ID forms of those attributes. In other words, the granularity of the report is always the smallest possible with the columns in the grid. Take a report with year, month, and date: the granularity will be at date level. This is the default behavior of metrics, and it is somehow limiting: what if I want to see in the same grid the monthly sales and the yearly sales? Here comes the level metric that allows us to decide the level of aggregation of a number. Sounds interesting, and surely it takes a little getting ...