9.5.2 - the highlights

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Martin Ryan
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9.5.2 - the highlights

Post by Martin Ryan »

CHANGE LOG
18th May 2011 - Steve Vincent - Added Info on Replication Issues after an upgrade


The 9.5.2 post was getting a bit convoluted so below is a highlights reel which I’ll update as that post gets updated. Please continue the discussion in that thread.

IBM links
New features
Change log

New features summary

Parallel interaction
A new TM1 object locking approach that increases user throughput by lessening situations that result in write transactions that are "blocked" by concurrent read and write transactions.
lotsaram wrote: From my understanding 9.5.2 is a MAJOR release which implements cube data versioning trees. This should virtually eliminate locking and the need in prior versions to partition high concurrency planning models into multiple data entry sub-cubes in order to prevent locking and preserve performance with lots of write-back users.

This is a major change to say the least. It should be AWESOME (once the bugs that I'm sure are there are ironed out) but my advice would be to test very well and regression test everything before deploying to a production environment
IBM testing reveals a 10-30% RAM overhead when parallel interaction is on.

The relevant cfg parameter is "ParallelInteraction=T". It is disabled by default.

This feature was previously known as cube versioning. This name is now defunct as is the cfg parameter "UseCubeVersioning" details are here.

Best practice advice from IBM.

Managing threads for Job queue processing when using parallel interaction.

More from IBM

Data reservation
A new TM1 cube level configuration that provides the ability for users to gain "exclusive write access" to designated data slices of a cube, preventing other users with write access updating the reserved data. More

Multi-node edit
A new TM1 Contributor capability that provides contributors and approvers the ability to perform write back on data representing more than one node in an approval hierarchy. More.

TM1Top
Incremental capabilities to existing TM1Top that provide operational administrators insight into sandbox and job queue server activity. More.

TM1 Widget with IBM Cognos Business Insight conformance
TM1 Widgets support a complete set of toolbar capabilities on the IBM Cognos Business Insight toolbar. Prior releases of TM1 require the native TM1Web toolbar in the body of the Widget.

Added five languages
Traditional Chinese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish,Russian.

Enhanced job queuing
Job queues are processed by multiple threads when used in conjunction with parallel interaction. (Note link from above:
Managing threads for Job queue processing when using parallel interaction)

Conformance upgrade for TM1 Package Connector
The TM1 Package Connector includes conformance for IBM Cognos Business Intelligence V10.1.0.

Excel 2010 Support
32 bit only.
9.5.2 supported environments
Potential problem

Client Logging for TM1 desktop applications
More

Known Issues / Upgrade Anomolies
Replication
After an upgrade (confirmed from 9.0 to 9.5.2) any replications already set up will need to be recreated. Although they seem to run, no changes are taken across. Its assumed this relates to the significant changes in the database (UNICODE) as well as the format of log files.


New functions for TI/Rules
The following new functions are available in TM1, version 9.5.2 for use with rules and TurboIntegrator:
● ConsolidatedMin
● ConsolidatedMax
● ConsolidatedAvg
● ConsolidatedCount
● ConsolidatedCountUnique

Note: These functions were not documented in the standard TM1 9.5.2 documentation. See this technote for details.

Community Comment
stephen waters wrote: in general, if you have an existing system you should be cautious about upgrading to a brand new software release unless there is some specific functionality you need.

With Version 9.5.2 in particular I would be especially cautious since I think the release is much more significant than the incremental naming (9.5.1 -> 9.5.2) suggests. There are major changes\enhancement to the database locking and processing which look very good but may take some time to settle down. The last time they made such significant changes was Ver 9.0 -> Ver 9.1 (admittedly pre-IBM days) and many on the forum will remember how painful that was.

One reason to go 9.5.2 provides Excel 2010 (32 bit) support (see https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview ... 27020888#1). Several of our clients have been waiting for this for some time. Another reason is if you have immediate need of the new locking mechanism. Otherwise I suggest you upgrade to 9.5.1, applying all the hotfixes, which should give you a stable, established platform. Look at 9.5.2 in a few months time when any rough edges have been smoothed out.
kpk wrote: I have successfully installed the complete TM1952 on a 32bit W7 Pro notebook.
As far as I remember I could not install the TM1web part of TM1950 and TM1951 on this notebook and were forced to use virtual machines.
mattgoff wrote: Reader vs writer locking is the last major performance issue I face. Through cube (re)design I've managed to get rid of most of the other blocks. 9.1 helped but was a bit of a disappointment-- fingers crossed it's for real this time. Now if I can only get them to fix replication....
Steve Rowe wrote: It's good to see this level of detail in the docs, in the Applix days the detail of how the engine work seemed to more of mystic lore passed from mouth to ear.
The new functionality looks good as long as it doesn't slow readers down to much when it's off.
Just the calculation engine to get multi-threaded I guess?
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