ODBO Virtual Cubes

[David Usherwood]

I stumbled on these the other day and for a time I thought I'd finally found the TM1 inter-server connectivity I've been after for many years - sadly no.
When writing a TI, the options within the ODBO source are Cube, Dimension and MDX Query. Selecting Cube leads you to a connection dialogue where you can connect to any TM1 server you can see, list out the cubes to which your credentials entitle you, and select a Cube Type. In my testing, selecting Physical generated code (somewhere) which errored - but selecting Virtual allows you to create a cube which appears to reside in your destination server but actually takes all its content (including rule logic) from the source server.
Great, I thought - finally we have cross server connectivity. But no...
a String data isn't read
b Control cubes aren't visible, but finally
c The Virtual cube is not selectable by TI in the destination server! Though you can browse/slice it.
So near....
Clearly, a product manager wrote the spec for this and a developer built and tested it. Can anybody suggest what it was for? (Politely )
(Test environment 10.1.1 FP1 though the options are available in 9.5.2 at least and maybe earlier.)

[jim wood]

My guess would be it's of the new promotion engine for promoting objects between servers??

[Wim Gielis]

David - is your post about what Ben Hill posted about here? :
http://blog.tm1tutorials.com/2012/07/27 ... 1-servers/

[David Usherwood]

Not quite - Ben's blog post is about creating Physical cubes. As I mentioned, when I tried this option the TI failed with a less than helpful message:

Code: Select all

MDX query execution failed - HRESULT: 80040e14, Minor Code: 0, 
Source: Applix TM1 OLEDB Error Lookup Service, Description: MDX query failed

I will admit that the built (but empty) cube was visible to TI, unlike the virtual cube.

(@jim, I don't think it relates to the promotion tool in Performance Middler, since the function is in 9.5.2 at least.)

[jim wood]

They have been known to build features in on early releases as part of the development build up. Saying that, it was only a shot in the dark anyway.

[hbell]

Is it readable by rules, and could it therefore function as a way of distributing reference data (like FX rates) across servers?

[David Usherwood]

Interesting thought.
You can write a rule which refers to the virtual cube - it shows on the selector. Sadly all values return #N/A.
I remain puzzled about why the feature is there (albeit FUBAR) and what it was meant to do. I'm pretty sure it was for talking to MS Analysis Services, but even so.