Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook

Aggregating results with custom groups

Custom groups are another type of object that allow us to aggregate results on a report or document. They differ from consolidations in several aspects, the most important being that the SQL needed to calculate custom groups is executed on the RDBMS side.

Unlike consolidations, custom groups cannot perform row-level calculations; but they offer a lot of flexibility when defining the elements. A custom group element is a set of rows identified by a name and a filter condition. Thinking about the previous example: instead of manually picking all the 14 London elements of the City attribute, we would create a filter that restricts only those elements with the DESC form beginning with London.

Additionally, in the ...