macsir wrote:tomok wrote:macsir wrote:Yes, it is very odd that general user can't open PM from the portal. What is IBM thinking, for god's sake! If PM is a replacement for perspective, it should allow!!!
Where in the world did you get the idea that PM is a replacement for Perspectives? Performance modeller is for building models, something that users would normally never do, only administrators. I'm sure that's why you have to be an admin to open it. PM is a replacement for the "model building" tasks that can be done in Architect or Perspectives, nothing else.
Hi, tomok. No one tells me like that. It is my own thought based on observation.
They're not keeping the fact a secret, though they don't go into the whys and wherefores of which tool is intended for what; Performance Muddler manual, page 2:
PM Manual wrote:Starting Cognos TM1 Performance Modeler
You can create and manage IBM Cognos TM1 Applications in IBM Cognos TM1 Performance Modeler.
Before you begin To create and manage Cognos TM1 Applications, you must be a member of the ADMIN group on the TM1 server.
macsir wrote:Tomok wrote:PM is a replacement for the "model building" tasks that can be done in Architect or Perspectives, nothing else.
Then what is the advantage to use PM for model building? Don't tell me you can remove or add dimension dynamically or similar things like that in that tool. These are small improvements rather than advantages.
Both Tomok and yourself have sadly been misled by the IBM marketing department. For you see, it was never the intention that Performance Muddler be used for TM1 model building.
It is in fact a secret research project by the IBM Biomedical Division to find a cure for hypotension in TM1 developers. (That's
low blood pressure.)
You see
{pull up a chair and sit a spell son, this is a long tale...}, when the patient starts up that bloated pig of a thing (I'm sorry, I meant to say "fine piece of software", it's just that I had some truth serum for lunch and it hasn't all washed out of my system yet) and has to wait an interminable amount of time before they see anything appear other than a splash screen, it will raise their blood pressure slightly. Then each and every frapping time they get a dialog asking what they want to do with the file provagent-InsertIncreasingNumber.cogcrp_modeler, it will raise it just that little bit further. (And if they've used Performance Muddler more than a few times in the past they probably have a quite fixed idea of what they want to tell the browser to do with that particular waste of bytes.) Then they get a "canvas" which gives them absolutely no idea of what to do and where to go, and consists of nothing more descriptive than a bunch of nondescript icons which they need to figure out the purpose of themselves. At this point if the patient is lucky they may see a dialog pop up out of nowhere with a big red X and an intuitive explanation like "Java could not create the view Java.lang.noclassdeffounderror:orga.apache.commons.csvBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlah stretching down half the page. This is pure, inspired genius on the part of whoever came up with that one because it should cause a minimum 2 percentage point bump in the systolic pressure. However it's not 100% effective because some patients may realise that like so much else in Performance Muddler the dialog is bulls*** and can be simply disregarded and closed.
The patient might, perhaps, go to the Tools dialog since at least the little spanner and screwdriver (we'll come back to those) are relatively intuitive. And they might select their server. And they may be rewarded with an IBM Cognos TM1 Application Configuration dialog which tells them that the server will not be supported by IBM Cognos TM1 Performance Muddler (it's important that the patient be made to read the
full name) because a particular config parameter (one of the longer ones which I would type here but I'm not sure that my fingers could manage it) is missing. No offer to
add the config parameter to the file, oh no, that wouldn't be sufficiently annoying but I concede that would only work reliably if the config file was on the machine that they have Performance Muddler running on. But also, no chance to
copy the parameter so that they could paste it into their config file. (In fact this is a missed opportunity since you can imagine the look on the patient's face when they get to the config file and find that the entry is
already in the file.)
And of course that dialog is a fabrication too because when the patient exits the configuration dialog and finds the Performance Muddler icon (the one that looks more or less identical to the Insight one) then lo and behold, there's the server that "will not be supported" after all. This will probably have the patient's BP fluctuating wildly now between frustration at getting incorrect, time wasting, garbage dialogs, and relief at finding that the dialogs are wrong and that they can work with Performance Muddler anyway.
They could then, if they like, use the oh so s'phisticated TI editor that still doesn't even have correct find and replace functionality, much less a genuine Intellisense-type system 16 years after one first appeared in the Visual Basic for Applications Editor, but I've written about that before and need not do so again. At this point the patient's BP should be well elevated and certainly within the lower end of normal range at the very least.
Unfortunately some of the more effective BP-elevating features of Performance Muddler are hidden behind the scenes, probably because exposing them to the patient would push the hypotension into
hypertension. For example, go to C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Roaming\IBM and check the size of the folders. Hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes of digital bloat choking up your hard drive. Of course I grant you that this is a mere drop in the ocean compared to the 1.6
gigabytes of the DocLibrary, 22 separate languages which slow the installation process down by a ridiculous amount and chew up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth and/or disk space in both the installation packages and in the installed application because it would be just oh too much trouble to have single language installs which the vast majority of TM1 installations would be. But I'm wandering off topic.
Oh, I'd said that we'd come back to the spanner and screwdriver.
The one basic flaw in the Performance Muddler Hypotension Relief Software is this; because of frustration at essential functionality being ignored for so many years (see, for example, the classic TI Editorsaurus in Perspectives, or perhaps the method that you need to use to get shortcuts into applications folders), and because the only replacement on the horizon is Performance Muddler (does anyone else think that the Java logo should be changed from a cup of coffee to a graphic of a virus invading a host? Just asking...), there are almost no TM1 developers who
have low blood pressure. (Except maybe for Mike Cowie who somehow always manages to cultivate an aura of calm.) A lot of them tend to be florid-faced, snarling and ready to apply the wrench and the screwdriver to their monitors with no small amount of force in frustration at the gap (nay, verily I should say "chasm") between what TM1 is
capable of doing, and how easily (or not) it
lets them do those things.
So while Performance Muddler is most certainly a powerfully effective cure for hypotension, me firing it up again today to be able to write this synopsis has reminded me of why I hold it in the amount of... esteem that I do.
