I used to use Replication during the last Ice Age. I don't know how it is for anyone else but I found it to be as "reliable" as any given system for picking horse race winners; which is to say, "not". It would randomly stop working for no obvious reason and you'd have to unpick the replication and try it again.... until the next time it randomly stopped working, lather, rinse and repeat until you finally said "You know what, stuff this" and wrote TIs to export the structure for reimport.TM1 does not a user friendly and easy mechanism to transfer data between different TM1 servers. Currently there are 2 options, but none of them can be properly used:
1 - Use Replication to transfer and synchronize data from different TM1 servers: This option is not useful if data is not manually entered in TM1 and recorded via transaction logs. If source data is calculated via rules and consolidations, then it does not work. If source data is transferred to TM1 cube via TI process without logging, then it does not work. Therefore this option is not useful in 90% of the cases.
2 - Using ODBO as data source in a TI process. This option is not user friendly at all because it works via MDX queries. It never worked for our requirements.
I'm in agreement with option 2. Given the new REST API, this should not be an impossible challenge.As a solution to this problem:
a new feature can be added in either of the following 2 options:
1 - Add an option to replication/synchronization definition in a way not use transaction log files but read the source cube itself when doing the synchronization every time. Moreover replication feature should also have the capability to read source cube views that are calculated via rules or dimension consolidations so that a high level summary of a source cube can be transferred to a target cube with less dimensions.
2 - In a TI process, when using IBM Cognos TM1 as data source, it should allow, not only using the cubes in the same TM1 server, but it should also allow connecting to a different TM1 server and using its cubes in the same way. In this option, it should allow using existing cubes views or subsets in source TM1 server.
It has 8 votes at the moment and is still in the "needs review" stage. If you like the idea, I encourage voting early and voting often via the link in the opening paragraph.