MicroStrategy | New format for Inbox files in MicroStrategy Intelligence Server 9.0.1

When using file based history list in MicroStrategy Intelligence Server 9.0.0 and earlier, Inbox files for a user would be stored in a single file on disk. The Inbox file corresponding to a user would have the GUID of the user (e.g. 54F3D26011D2896560009A8E67019608) as the file name. All the information related to that user’s history list messages would be stored within that file.

Starting with MicroStrategy Intelligence Server 9.0.1, some changes have been made to how Inbox files are created for File based history list messages.

With the new format in 9.0.1, each user’s history list message(s) will be stored across 3 different types of files (instead of the one file in pre-9.0.1)

Instead of creating the history list messages for all projects in a single file, history list messages are split up by project and  date of message creation. This stores the history list info and the name format for the file is: UserID-I-Date-ProjID, For example, 54F3D26011D2896560009A8E67019608-I-2009-5-11-B19DEDCC11D4E0EFC000EB9495D0F44F. A single user can have multiple sublist files.

This stores the history list message results, like document instance stream, PDF exporting result, Excel exporting result. It’s format is UserID-R-Date-MessageID.ResultType. For example: 54F3D26011D2896560009A8E67019608-R-2009-5-18-41C35C384F209C56F2CC4B9571D56E57.strm

This lock file is mainly used in a clustered environment to address problems that can occur when one node is changing a file and the other node tries to load the file at the same time. One user (Inbox) will have only one lock file. The format for this file name is UserID.lock. For example: 54F3D26011D2896560009A8E67019608.lock

Some advantages of the new format include:  

There are no manual upgrade steps involved in the upgrade of history list messages from 9.0.0 format to 9.0.1 format. When a user with existing 9.0.0 history list messages logs in to MicroStrategy Intelligence Server 9.0.1, MicroStrategy Intelligence Server 9.0.1 runs the upgrade in the background and the Inbox file from 9.0.0 is split into the multi-file format of 9.0.1.