Is TM1 9.5x stable?

[mce]

Hi,

We have TM1 9.0 SP1. We decided to upgrade to the latest version 9.5.1 to benefit from the new features, such as Sandboxes and Contributor.
When we approach to IBM account managers to discuss this, they recommended not to upgrade to 9.5x version because it is not a stable version and we may have problems.
Therefore they recommended to upgrade to 9.4.3.

This was quite strange to me as I know that the new features in 9.5 are used a lot in promoting TM1 to new clients.

Any comments? or Any recommendations on upgrade?

Regards,

[harrytm1]

I find that 9.4.1 is stable enough. I encountered very serious problems with FP2 and FP3 for 9.4, so I had to rollback to 9.4.1.

As for 9.5.0, the problem we encountered is with the failure to generate log files (not sure what triggered it though) due to some "memory buffer limit" thingy. We had just installed 9.5.1, so can't really comment yet, except for the post i just made on View Transaction Log errors.

Can't comment on Contributor and Sandbox too as we did not use much yet. Likewise for Web.

[comma]

I never used other TM1 version beside 9.5.0, so I can't give you a comparison.
But from my experience using the Contributor, I don't really like it.
- I think it's not very responsive, and the TM1 Web is a bit faster (I don't use Web at all, but I just try it out).

- User cannot create Private View in Contributor. It will only 'remember' (not saving) user's last view.

- I also have experienced several TM1 Server crashes when users are using the Contributor, but when they use Perspectives it works fine. I still don't know what's the root cause of the problem until now (you can refer to here).

- I cannot Slice, Snapshot, or Export To PDF more than 245 rows in Contributor. I always get Operations Failed message. Still no clue on this one too, whether this is because of the model or because of the Contributor, but from TM1 Web I can export 2000 rows.

- As for the Sandbox, if you apply Security to your cubes, it won't have much use for you. For example, you have Group A and Group B. Group A has access to Currency Rate cube, and Group B has access to Sales cube, which inputted in several currencies. Then user 1 in Group B want to see his Sales with different currency rates. This can't be done by using Sandbox, because when user 1 create new Sandbox, it will only appear in Sales cube, not in the Currency Rate cube.

That's all of the bads from me, maybe someone can add the goods?
I have not try the 9.5.1, so can't say much.

[rfielden]

We are having issues with 9.5.1 during our testing (currently on 9.1 SP2 U3) and response time from Support not the best.

- Active Form feature we like but when we slice to excel from web we get #NAME error is first data cell. If run report in perspectives, this issue doesn't exist even though the same cell formula is referenced.

- On the web, a few reports will have 'missing data' or blank cells even though data exists and reports runs fine in Excel.

- The text on the action buttons that support on web menus disappears. Sometimes there first time log in but disappears if you sign in again, and other times doesn't appear at all.

- Users with Excel 2007 having all kinds of problems and very few things working correctly. Per Support: "Unless Excel 2007 has to be deployed, I would suggest to use Excel 2003 with TM1 9.5.1 Perspective in the interim as it is likely more stable."

[mattgoff]

9.5.0 (and probably 9.5.1) is still broken for Excel 2007. The good news is there are workarounds:

• Search for and rename tm1pRibbonX.xlam (should be located in C:\Program Files\Cognos\TM1\bin). This will disable the "TM1" tab in Excel 2007, but you still have access to everything via the legacy controls under the "Add Ins" tab. This will solve a major performance bug that, left unfixed, makes TM1 basically unusable, especially Active Forms.
• Never save templates using the .xlsx format. You'll periodically get #NAME? errors even when TM1 is loaded. To fix a corrupt file, first save as an xls, make sure you're logged in to TM1, then do a find "=" replace with "=". This will reevaluate each formula cell and should fix the corruption.

With these two workarounds, we've been running w/o issue for months.

Matt

[kelso]

We decided to go three months ago with 9.4 MR1 FP3 because it had many corrections to problems we were finding and 9.5 didnt had any FP at that moment. I feel the best you can do is invest some time with your model in testing 9.5.1, I don´t feel is unstable at all, with the tests I made but we are not intensive at TM1Web.

Rds,

[lotsaram]

There are a few minor client side issues in 9.5.1 that mainly affect performance in Excel 2007. But the server is stable.

[hbell]

We are 4 days into an upgrade from 9.1.3 to 9.5.1. Server stability is (so far) OK. However, we are already getting a lot of anecdotal reports of instability and Excel crashes on the Client side. Our client installation is in Citrix. This seems particularly to relate to situations where users are browsing large views. We are also noticing that, where a user gets timed out, trying to close an extant cube views is also causing Excel (2003) to crash - whereas the old version used to take this in its stride and allow the user to log directly back into the server.

We have also had difficulty with (but have been able to work around) the following:

1) XDI files with control characters - now cause a problem when compiling the dim
2) Client locale now seems to influence (through formats we think) the ability of users in some countries to open some websheets

On the positive side, retrieval times seem to be much improved and cut/paste functionality in web is more flexible.

hugh

[markkelley]

9.5.1 server seems pretty rock-solid. The client is a nightmare, though. It always sets the Excel calculation to automatic. It opens a book1 workbook, that asks the user to save changes before closing. It produces lag in certain spreadsheets, even when calc is set to manual, when the user arrows to cells. It also has an issue with merged cells, and column selections.

The post above, suggesting to re-name the tm1pRibbonX.xlam file, seems to fix all of the above except the merged cell selections.

[jason]

We upgraded from 9.1.3 to 9.5.1 10 days ago and so far so good. I noticed server start up is faster. And tm1sd memory usage on 64 bit Windows went from 9gb to 3.5gb.
We've seen the Client Excel issue with merged cells. And I found out the hard way that Pick Lists do not work on Control cubes / dimensions.

[lotsaram]

We upgraded from 9.1.3 to 9.5.1 10 days ago and so far so good. I noticed server start up is faster. And tm1sd memory usage on 64 bit Windows went from 9gb to 3.5gb.

Were you loading on multiple cores in both versions and was the memory reduction due to switching to persistent feeders and consequent reduction in garbage memory from redundant feeding?

If so this is another good selling point for persistent feeders aside from the huge reduction in server load time. If not then what's the reason for the reduction in memory as otherwise this memory reduction seems odd?

[jason]

We did the TM1 upgrade on the same Windows 2003 Standard x64 box (no changes to hardware). The processor is Intel E5520 Quad core.

Actually, we set PersistentFeeders = F. I saw a warning on the Message Board that Persistent Feeders may not handle conditional feeders properly. Did not want to risk breaking anything.

My 'best guess' as to why we have a memory reduction upgrading from 9.1.3 to 9.5.1 is that certain bugs may have been fixed?

[David Usherwood]

"Persistent Feeders may not handle conditional feeders properly".

To clarify that - replace 'properly' with 'at all'. My take at present is that if you change the flags driving conditional feeders you should delete _all_ the .feeders files to get them to work. I was surprised that (I think) you can't just delete the feeders cubes for the affected cubes. Haven't tested properly though. But I still like the feature - really good for restarts.

[BigDSter]

We are just testing 9.5.1 64bit server, one question though, if you didn't want all the above issues with the client, could you still use an older client. We have a large install base of 9.4.1 but at first test although I've added the adminhost name into the options my install of it won't see the 9.5.1 server.

[BigDSter]

Right ignore that, managed to research a bit further and it was the adminhost port settings that needed to be unblocked. Working okay now ta

[edward]

Right ignore that, managed to research a bit further and it was the adminhost port settings that needed to be unblocked. Working okay now ta

Hi David,

How did you managed to fix this as we are currently having issues.

Thanking you

Edward

[edward]

ignore the last post found the issue ...