TM1 10.2 Available for Download

[George Regateiro]

Of course they drop it during my year end but it appears that 10.2 is available for download.

http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/ctm1/ ... ction.html

[Kyro]

We've released an overview of the changes here. Please note that there are a lot of changes this time around and for the better in my opinion.

I would say the key things to note are:

• Single Requests are now multithreaded (divide your view calculation time by the number of CPU Cores you have and thats the time it will take in 10.2)
• Performance Modeler is ready to replace Perspectives
• TM1 Web had a complete rebuild for performance and better underlying technology
• Cognos Analysis for Excel (Cafe) - has been released (separate installer) which supports TM1 and BI Datasources.

We'll be posting 10 articles on different aspects of this new version over the next 10 days. The in-cube calculations and performance testing vs. 10.1 are my favourites so far. Stay tuned.

Cheers,
Ben

[David Usherwood]

InfoCat's take on the new features is here.
I'd say that Scorecarding is noteworthy as a slicker way to monitor and communicate variances. And Cloud will shake things up somewhat.

[Kyro]

On a related note.

The TM1 Contributor iPad application is out now on iTunes! Its a free application which can be used with TM1 10.2 to contribute to plans within TM1.
Since we don't all have TM1 10.2 servers lying around we have set up a sample TM1 10.2 server which you can gain access to here.

Corporate Travel Planning Sample Application

[erik664]

I would be interested to see if Perfomance Modeler is actually usable now. I've heard it said that it's being pushed just to move away from Perspectives and spite Microsoft.

[wissew]

Has anyone gotten Performance Modeler 10.2 to work?

[Alan Kirk]

I would be interested to see if Perfomance Modeler is actually usable now. I've heard it said that it's being pushed just to move away from Perspectives and spite Microsoft.

To be fair, that last part you might have heard from me, and that's me reading between the lines. I still think it's a valid assumption though. You could argue the case that moving to "canvases" in the style of Insight makes them less dependent on an external company (i.e. Microsoft) which is also true of their move away from IIS for Web. That one I'll reserve judgement on until I see it in action. However if IBM ever completely breaks the nexus between TM1 and Excel, they'll effectively kill the product. I think that the closer the IBMer is to the user base, the more they know this... what concerns me is that a lot of the allegedly strategic decisions are made some distance away from that level. They may indeed make themselves less dependent on Microsoft but moving to Java makes them dependent on Oracle. And between Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, I know which one I'd least be surprised to find sitting on the throne of Hell with a pointy tail, horns and a pitchfork. And it ain't Gates.

I see nothing in the New Features Guide that suggests that they've done a damn thing about that joke that's being passed off as a TI editor, though. That doesn't mean that they haven't, but it wouldn't surprise me.

I'd love to see for myself first hand but when I went to download 10.2 I was told that our entitlement was invalid (gee, after all those $$$$) and when I went to click on the link to Customer Care (never was a greater misnomer coined) I slammed into a page which read:

Error 400
Invalid request -- completely unable to parse it

What "it" is is unspecified. Merely that not only could "it" not be parsed, "it" completely could not be parsed. And the browser was done. No going back, no going forward. Just that one page telling me that "it" was "completely" unable to be parsed.

I shall be charitable and assume that this is not an example of what I'll find in the All New Web.

When or if "it" can be parsed and I can get the 10.2 download, that is.

[stephen waters]

I would be interested to see if Perfomance Modeler is actually usable now. I've heard it said that it's being pushed just to move away from Perspectives and spite Microsoft.

I believe Performance Modeller(PM) has been developed, not to spite Microsoft. but rather to convert and capture the Cognos Planning (CP) user base and persuade them to migrate to TM1. Many of the features and concepts of CP have been duplicated in PM, but are used to build much more scalable TM1 structures.

I really like PM, but I have gone to the dark side and mainly do pre-sales demos. My colleagues who develop proper TM1 applications are much more sceptical and have concerns about the efficiency of the PM generated TM1 code for all but the simplest TM1 applications. I hope IBM Cognos remembers the history of CP (you can have a product that looks great but performs poorly) and continues to allow developers access to underlying Rules and TI.

On a positive note I am really impressed by many of the TM1 10.2 features. The multi-threaded calculation will benefit all users to a greater or lesser extent ( I think even those on legacy licensing) and, for those on Enterprise licensing, will finally justify PVU pricing! Goodbye to the forum posts questioning why a 16 core server is running at 6% per core; yes, it should run 16 times faster with 10.2, This is of course subject to testing though our intial results seem to confirm the linear improvement.

The rewrite of TM1 Web and introduction of Café to complement Perspectives should significantly improve web performance (another long standing forum subject) and make browsing much more intuitive. It also shows that IBM Cognos are committed to the Excel interface which is, and always has been, such a strong feature of TM1.

Other stuff such as mobile contribution and scorecards look good but I think are more demoware

Anway, I had better stop there I start sounding like an IBM marketing person. But, I would encourage TM1 users to look at 10.2 and think of reasons why you shouldn't upgrade rather than our normal advice of "is there a reason why you should upgrade?". All subject to testing of course

[Kyro]

We've conducted some tests on the performance gains under the new version - Results here.

To cut a long story short the performance is enhanced directly by the number of CPU Cores as expected. However, this has only effected the actual calculation of cells - Rule saves and server load take the same time. Data loading was actually faster performing also but not at the same rate.

[nick_leeson]

Thanks Kyro for the results interesting that 50% increase in performance in loading a CSV is not bad and the performance of Cube View Load is great.
I will do some testing later tonight and see how 10.2 performs on a 50 GB model.
Cafe looks interesting and would love to see someone stress test it. Can we use subsets in Cafe ?

The biggie is reuse of approval hierarchies and TM1Web.


Cognos EP guys transitioning onto TM1 have got more goodies again then the TM1 purists.

[karkea]

I did also some quick tests with PM, because we have some customers interested using PM by themselves.

PM seems to now include Package Connector to load data through FM models. Unfortunately it generates temporary csv file, which is used in the actual process to load the data. And it generates new temp file each time you want to load the data. Just in couple minutes I was able to generate hundreds of these temporary files. And especially scary is the fact load, which can generate +100Mb temp files. For sure one shouldn't touch these processes with Architect, because PM doesn't use the same package connector model than Architect.

Maintaining processes in general seems to be a bit challenging in PM. I could not for example change the target cube of the process after I had created the process.

I will need to spend some more time with PM in order to be able to decide whether it feasible for production use.

[garry cook]

Anyone got any feedback on stability with the final release? Been waiting on multi threaded queries for a long time and assume the NDA's have finished now from the beta.

TIA

[dr.nybble]

Package extract does not use Package Connector. It builds a report specification and extracts it to CSV as you mentioned.
If it is leaving CSV files lying around after the process executes -- that is a defect.

[jim wood]

Guys,

While I hear what's been said about moving away Microsoft, I don't think this has been done to spite them. Currently (10.1 and below) TM1 has a 64-bit Unix install but if you want to use TM1 Web you need a seperate windows box. With this change I'm guessing that we will see complete server install packages for Unix. Also Apache / Tomcat are much configurable for me than IIS, especially if you consider how tied down the latest version is on 2008 r2,

Jim.

[Duncan P]

A small feature that might escape people's notice but about which I am rather pleased is this

ISUNDEFINEDCELLVALUE

[lotsaram]

A small feature that might escape people's notice but about which I am rather pleased is this

ISUNDEFINEDCELLVALUE

A feature that does make using UNDEFVALS much more useable!

However it does draw attention to IBM's atrocious and obviously not improved record when it comes to product documentation, given that right alongside in the 10.2 reference is the entry for UNDEFVALS which states

It is not currently possible in Turbo Integrator to test for this special undefined value directly. This special undefined value is not the value returned by the UNDEF() Turbo Integrator function. The value returned by UNDEF() is an undefined value used for such things as an attempt to divide by zero, or take the logarithm of an illegal number, etc.
You can indirectly test for this special undefined value as follows ...

[Kyro]

Just posted an overview of the new metric cube - check it out here.



We were going to add some more applications to the mobile contributor portal for general access but have run into a minor roadblock.

[ThomasCS]

I'm very interested in the new TM1 web. Performance (especially websheets) and stability (building from scratch will for sure bring new bugs).

About the new features for Performance Modeler & Applications, I hope those products are now more flexible/mature to be used in Production.
Am I correct that the new cube type can only be created in Performance Modeler and not in Architect?

What is the future of Perspectives? It looks like CAFE is getting pushed as alternative towards endusers.
But what with active forms and websheets and all of their flexibility from development side?

[Kyro]

Yeah, maybe someone should do a performance test of TM1Web 10.1 vs 10.2.

They are certainly getting more mature. Along with the new features are bug fixes and also changes which make the front-end flow a lot smoother for developers. There are things that will always bother me about it but only from a TM1 development perspective and I think thats the mistake, we really need to look at this as its own tool held apart from traditional TM1. I think some of the best practise and time proven development methods in TM1 really don't apply here as they don't need to or they don't make sense. Perhaps approach 10.2 Performance Modeler with that in mind.

True - Metric cubes can only be developed in Performance Modeler.

As for the future I can't say, but I think we should all be getting used to Performance Modeler & Cafe regardless.

[ThomasCS]

For sure Performance Modeler is a great tool from what I've seen and tested and some day I'll be using it in a project.

My biggest concern is losing the active forms and websheet flexibility in the future without have the tools to fill the gap.
It's just because there hasn't been any improvements/changes on those tools in the latest versions.