All, I like what I see thus far with regards to MSTR Desktop.
One of the issues that I had when I reviewed Micosoft Power BI for possible adoption was their inability to directly query a database (They can but it is limited to SQL Server and Oracle) what this forces users to do is download data sets into memory on their local machine. While this is great and works in many cases it does not work for all cases.
Fortunatly this is not Power BI and we can directly query many many databases directly...here is my experiance.
I am fortunate to run a columnar database, Infobright, which has blazingly fast speeds with no optimization required. This allows me to run most things directly against the DW which enhances Data Governance. My concern was if I built a dashboard on my local desktop and share the report with somone else (User B), what would happen to the database connection. So...I did a test. I built a DSN-less connection on my local machine and then shared the report with "User B". when "User B" opennd the MSTR file, they were asked to provide credentials(Good thing) for the database. After entering the Username and password the "User B" opened the dashboard and there was the correct data. To chack to see if I was really connected and this was not some Hogwarts Fakery, I had "User B" add an attribute to the report and sure enough the database monitor showed the database being accesse by "User B's" computer.
SO then I wanted to see the connection on "User B's" MSTR Desktop. I went to "Edit Data Set" then to "Edit Table" and to my surprise, ther was no connection information. at first I was "concerned" ! Then, after thinking on it, I decided that this may not be so bad. I like managing the very clean datasets that I provide to my customers and this really save me the headach of fixing what they Break when they just go "looking". so...for now, I am happy!
NOW The Fix request. In desktop, one of the Certified Database Options is Infobright(MYSQL Variant). Unfortunatley, the driver that is loaded with desktop is not the certified driver. I went to MSTR's Driver and Connectors page and it indicates that the Infobright driver ships with the product so I could not download it from there. I eventually did identify and load the driver from Oracle. Can you eithe add the correct driver in the next release of Desktop or allow me to download it from your site. For now, all of my end users will need to load the driver manually(User B had to load it). not a big deal. I am working on a batch file to load MSTR Desktop and the ODBC driver at the same time.
Hope you all have a great weekend!
Jon