Transport Tool

[JamiseBondi]

Hi All,

After working with TM1 for a little while and discussing with colleagues how SAP works it has become apparent that there is a gap in the TM1 toolset when it comes to transporting objects in a three tier environment. Let me ellaborate.

We have a Development, QA and Production environment. When we do testing in Dev and we think it's OK we 'transport' to QA, test in QA and if QA is fine then it's transported to Prod. QA is always a recent copy of Prod and Dev is a little older but kept up to date monthly with copies from Prod.

Examples of objects we 'transport' (I say this loosely as I may be wrong in the way we transport objects between tiers) are:
dimensions
subsets
rules
cubes (rarely)
.... etc

When we want a rule in Dev to be transported through to QA, we go into the file system on Dev, copy the 'cube'.rux file and paste it over the corresponding file in QA (deleting the 'cube'.blb if it exists in QA). The same applies to subset files and dimension files(which consists of three files).

This seems like quite an archaic way of doing things and is very error prone and there is no dependency checking to see if the object being transported depends on something else that isn't there.

Here's an example of the flaws of this method of transporting:
I transport a rux file to get rules into QA but the rules reference an element that hasn't been transported to QA yet so now the rules for that cube won't run at all until that particular rule is commented out or the element is transported into that environment. As you can see there are a lot of problems with this method.

What I'd like to ask the TM1 community is how you guys deal with getting development transported from one tier into another. SAP has a transport module that manages this and checks dependencies prior to executing the change and is not prone to copy/paste errors that a human is likely to do over time.
Are there tools out there, either in the IBM toolset or third party, that will manage this process better than using windows explorer and copying objects from one server to another?
thanks for your thoughts and insight.

[cgaunt]

Hello Jamise,

When we did some of the early customer beta testing for the then new 10.0 version of TM1, one of the ex cognos guys was looking at this. It had a very similar look and feel to the EP wizard for exporting these objects as a package. To my shame I might have been a little less than complimentary about it given the number of times that one had to press the OK button.

This has evolved somewhat to be less chatty is still available on the 'TM1 performance modeler' module, if you are using it. If you select a cube to export, it will pick the required dimensions, rules, dependant cubes etc. You can then export everything out to one location in your dev environment, to be retrieved by you QA environment etc.

To be honest, I still find that knowing the TM1 infrastructure and underlying file system gives me greater control over moving items around and the time lost by not using performance monitor is more than made up by not being shoehorned into its way of creating models.

Hope this helps

-Chris

[lotsaram]

There seems to be some overlap in your questions so I answered here http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8717 (for the benefit of anyone who might search and find this post at a later date)