TM1 Forum

Hi All,

Our current TM1 installation is 10.2.2, which is fed by a nightly text file from SAP, version 7.5. We are in the process of upgrading TM1 to PAX as our SAP is revamped to S 4/HANA. Does anyone have experience using the TM1 SAP Connector in any iterations of these products? If so, have you experienced any implementation/maintenance challenges? We bought the connector some time ago, but have never used it.

I'm pretty sure the TM1 SAP Connector is no longer a product offered by IBM. I think that is part of the TM1 Package Connector, which I have never used.

Personally I am the lead of a TM1 model where SAP BW is one of the data sources. I am not aware of all the technical details, but at least I can say that:
- you create packages in Framework Manager
- you consume those packages in TI processes, either entirely, either in a filtered way
- 1 package in general is one query on the SAP side
- you can have dimension processes or load processes. In fact, the TM1 package connector allows 3 ways to connect to SAP (the packages actually)
- performance can be awful at times, and also, the run time of a process is largely dependent on the FM / package / SAP part, not so much the TM1 load/dim update part. This means that big loads during a nightly batch can take advantage of (parallel) exports of BI reports to text files, and then the text files are imported in TM1 in a chore. The BI reports that are exported are simple lists with the data of the query exposed in rows.
- adding a parameter to a TI process is piece of cake. Passing that parameter to the queried data in the FM package is less of a piece of cake...

Hi Wim,

I am trying to understand how we might be able to enable drill though from TM1 to BW.

Your post said

- adding a parameter to a TI process is piece of cake. Passing that parameter to the queried data in the FM package is less of a piece of cake...

If I read your quote with a very optimistic view, are you suggesting it is possible to pass a parameter in the query to the BW package or is it the alternative it can't be done?

Cheers,

Peter.

Hello,

Can you define drill-through ? Right-click on a cell in TM1 and having an extract from SAP in front of you on screen, matching the selections you made ? I have not done that in the past. If there's a relational database in the middle, it would be possible for sure.

You can read it in the optimistic way. It is possible to load in TI filtered data by passing a parameter to a query. But I did not set it up myself, though. I only see that it works in a model I am supporting nowadays.

Hi Wim,

From TI we can run the following BW query successfully where we use the wizard to generate the MDX and the "prompts" button to select the Company.

In the TI wizard we can see the following MDX expression. Using this example code we would like to change the Company [0COMP_CODE].[1003] to [0COMP_CODE].[1002].

Our initial attempt or test was to add the following line to the Prolog TI section. Are you able to provide an example of the TI variable where you have successfully passed a parameter ?

The drilldown wizard did not provide us much confidence as the IBM Cognos Package is greyed out.

Cheers,

Peter.

Hello

What is the data source to the process ? If ODBC then you can use a strategy like yours. Just replace the hard coded bits with parameters and you should be fine. Or use for example ‘?pCompany?’ to have the value of pCompany at runtime in your query.