Bryan Brandow (photo, right), a Data Engineering Manager for a large social media company, is one of my favorite bloggers out their in regards to thought leadership and digging deep into the technical aspects of Tableau and MicroStrategy. Bryan just blogged about triggering cubes and extracts on his blog. Here is a brief synopsis.

One of the functions that never seems to be included in BI tools is an easy way to kick off an application cache job once your ETL is finished. MicroStrategy’s Cubes and Tableau’s Extracts both rely on manual or time based refresh schedules, but this leaves you in a position where your data will land in the database and you’ll either have a large gap before the dashboard is updated or you’ll be refreshing constantly and wasting lots of system resources. They both come with command line tools for kicking off a refresh, but then it’s up to you to figure out how to link your ETL jobs to call these commands. What follows is a solution that works in my environment and will probably work for yours as well. There are of course a lot of ways for your ETL tool to tell your BI tool that it’s time to refresh a cache, but this is my take on it. You won’t find a download-and-install software package here since everyone’s environment is different, but you will find ample blueprints and examples for how to build your own for your platform and for whatever BI tool you use (from what I’ve observed, this setup is fairly common). Trigger was first demoed at the Tableau Conference 2014. You can jump to the Trigger demo here.

I recommend you click on the link above and give his blog post a full read. It is well worth it.

Best regards,

Michael