PaulSimon wrote:Hi Alan
I think that in this case the reluctance is more to do with the move to Unicode; go forward, and there's no going back since the database files are no longer backward-compatible.
Also my understanding is that the Unicode format will be more demanding on system resources, so it's best not to move (or upgrade the hardware first) if you're currently bumping the ceiling.
You can go back provided that you save your 9.1 Cubes before you open them in 9.4. Of course, if you have carried on developing in 9.4 for a month or two and then hit a problem which means that you need to go back, then you may have problems remembering all the changes since you took your cut of 9.1 cubes. However, if all else fails, it should still be possible to export the data, re-create the cubes in 9.1 and re-import it.
That's a good suggestion. If the cubes are huge you could be looking at quite a bit of down time while you do it, but it's certainly viable.
PaulSimon wrote:I have an application that generates a series of T_CREATE statements for the cubes on a server so that you can create an empty shell in which to import data.
What, you aren't using the API to do this?!?
PaulSimon wrote:I have TIs that export dims to files, and re-create them, etc. However, although there are often problems in new releases things have never been so bad that I have had to uninstall after a roll out. The bad problems are usually caught while testing the new release before roll out.
Usually, yes. Alas (and this is why I can understand some reluctance to go to 9.4 by some users), every so often there's an obscure bug which you won't find no matter how assiduously you test. I recall the one that throttled us in either 8.2.10 or .11 (can't remember which); it would crash the server if you had a person entering to one cube while another person was reading a second cube (related to the first, and a bunch of others, by rules). It's what bugs me when Iboglix's "solution" to a problem is "upgrade". Even if people have the time to run a sufficient battery of tests, there's always that one bug out there that's got somebody's name on it...
PaulSimon wrote:From what I have heard from David Usherwood, 9.4 is a better release than 9.1. We are having a few problems with 9.1 at the moment, but then I have had problems in every version of TM1, Essbase, MicroStrategy and SQL Server that I have used.
That's interesting. I haven't noticed a huge difference between them stability-wise (assuming that you sidestep the known landmines in 9.1, though I think that most of them are fixed in SP 4 anyway), though admittedly I only have 9.4 on a notebook since I don't have any spare servers to do an evaluation at the moment.
(Or I DID have it on a notebook until my grrrr-ing notebook decided that it would only talk to its monitor for 30 seconds at a time last weekend, then go black...)
As for having problems in every version... I hear ya'. As long as you know what to expect, though, you can navigate them. This is why everyone wants everyone else to go first. Unfortunately SOMEONE has to do it.
PaulSimon wrote:As for the performance side of things, that is something that you need to check out before upgrading. As I generally do testing on a desktop any performance issues tend to be quite obvious. I can't believe that it will be as bad as the memory hike in 9.1 if you didn't get the config settings right. After all most TM1 data is still numeric floating point data, and therefore it won't be affected by the unicode issue.
Yes, that's a good point; I think that 9.1 was the one I was mixing up with 9.4 there for some reason. The Unicode should only affect the string entries, though I'd expect that it will also make more demands in respect of metadata.