Upgrade - TM1 Version selection

[belair22]

From the horses mouth!

[BigDSter]

If you are considering 9.1\9.4 for improved reliablity and performance take care. Earlier SP's had severe problems and, although the worse ones are fixed, in certain areas performance is still not back to 8.4 levels. We have a client who had to upgrade from 8.4.5 to 9.4 because they were migrating to Excel 2007. They are very disappointed by the overall sluggishnness of the system, eg views that used to take 1-2 seconds to refresh now taking 14-15 seconds, plus their process workbooks take 20 times ( TWENTY times) as long to run. The response from Cognos support to these problems has been pretty disappointing as well.

I use 9.4 for demonstrations and am still not fully confident that it will behave properly, even simple actions like bringing up the "edit dimension" box can sometimes take 5-10 seconds when previously it was instantaneous.

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Best version at present? Unless there is a good reason not to (eg Vista, Excel 2007) we recommend our clients go 9.0 SP3, it is reliable, proven, repsonsive and supported.

I agree that active forms in 9.4 are a very nice feature (also action buttons in 9.1) but for most of our clients this is not yet compelling enough to take the risk and the current downsides of a move to 9.4.

Hmmm bit worried about this, , just had a question from one of our ops guys this morning "So does TM1 work on Excel 2007?" We are on 8.4.5 and although we get the occasional crash through to memory problems the server is pretty reliable, and the last time we tried to upgrade to a 9 series server we had a bit of a nightmare with locking issues making it unusable, prompting a quick retreat. From what I've read on here and the support notes, only 9.4 truely supports 2007 but there are some questions about its stability. Going to an earlier version probably wouldn't help re 2007.

What is the situation with server/client versions, in the past we've been able to upgrade the server but leave the client, even when the server moved to 9.0, but I'm guessing that 9.4 will need new everything, making upgrading a bit of a 1 hit bang, unless we have a brand new server to migrate everyone to one at a time once they've been upgraded to Excel 2007/9.4

So question is, what does everyone suggest

[Martin Erlmoser]

i suggest 9.1 SP4 for office 2007 unless you don't need activeforms & morethan255chars
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.w ... 14166#arch

[belair22]

For mine - TM1 9.4 and Excel 2003 works as you would expect. I've developed new models under this configuration and have encounter no problems. I've also upgraded a number of complex planning models running under Version 9.0 (x64) to v 9.4 and have had only positive feedback from users (generally all related to a much improved performance).

To the earlier poster - V.9 clients will continue to work with v9.4 (can't vouch for Version 8 clients but I'd assume there wouldn't be any issue).

One significant issue I've heard of is the use of Excel 2007 under TM1 9.4 - specifically to do with the 'multi-threading' setting in Excel 2007.

[paulsimon]

Hi

We have 9.1.4 on the server, and concurrent chores will still crash/lock up the server. We also have issues with SaveDataAll from TI. We have now removed Save Data from all TI, and rely on log files, and reloading from source in the event of a crash. Since taking the SaveData out of the Chores we haven't had a crash, but it has only been a week since then.

Deactivating a chore while it is running also causes a lock up. Deletion of elements referenced in rules, also seems to cause a crash. TM1 correctly reports the issue in the rules, and then falls flat on its face.

It is important to design (in other words split) cubes to take advantage of the new locking mechanism. We haven't gone as far as one cube per forecasting user, but we have separated our Forecast entry cube from our Reporting cube. However, that still causes problems, eg we update Actuals every 10 mins and write to both the Forecast and Reporting cubes, which locks up the Forecast cube for entry. We are considering just showing Actuals in the Forecast Template but that would limit the flexibility for Rule based calcs, eg we generally want to show Actuals for months prior to the months that the users are forecasting. Our current plan is to only load Actuals in to the Forecast cube overnight, which will mean that the Reporting cube and Forecast cube will be out of step. In general that is not too much of a problem as it is only the current incomplete month that is being loaded, and forecasting only uses complete months of actuals. However, there are inevitably some postings to the prior period.

There is also a fair amount of data duplication in this approach. Whether you have many Forecast entry cubes or one, you are still duplicating a lot of data in the Reporting cube. However, with 64 bit RAM that is now less of a problem.

When separate cubes (ie no rule or feeders linkages) are being updated, then the new locking mechanism does work well, ie users can continue to report from the Reporting cube, albeit a little slower, even if we are using TI to transfer scenarios around in the Forecast cubes.

If I were you I would either stick with Infocat's recommended 9.0 sub version, or jump straight to 9.4, and avoid 9.1.

At least with 9.4 you get Active Forms, and a better security model, and long strings. With 9.1 you got Dynamic Reports which didn't work, and a dubious locking mechanism, which is improved in 9.4. Also hopefully Cognos will be keener to support 9.4 than a prior version.

I have been using 9.4 MR1 for a while without problems, but we are still yet to do our production scale testing on it. If you get there before us, let me know how you get on.

Regards


Paul Simon