Applied Dimensionality

Thought I’d share the ‘standard’ tm1s-log.properties file I regularly use. tm1s-log.properties controls how and where tm1 logs things and the config file below generates you 4 files:

• tm1server.log – I’m adding the Debug level for locks to see the name of the objects locked at that point in time. I’m also switching the timezone to local to avoid the mental math of UTC conversion, it’s not worth it unless you’re running a truly global system.
• tm1event.log – Event logging as per this description, tells you ’thread X was running for more than 100s and was locked by thread Y’ type of things. Still not sure how useful it is, but why not :)
• tm1top.log – this is fairly new (2.7 onwards) and gives you good old tm1top logs as text files. You can either read them like text files (I do this 95% of the time) or you can load them into Apache Jmeter plugin to visualise threads per time
• tm1logins.log – this log just captures ‘user X has logged in’ events and is usefull for various licensing evaluations

I’m also limiting each file to 10mb in size (log4j.appender.S1.MaxFileSize) to make them easier to open and store 10 or 20 of such files (log4j.appender.S1.MaxBackupIndex).

Some of the largest performance gains I saw on a recent project came from ‘breaking up the circles’ in TI processes, so I thought that I’d do quick write-up on it. Nothing new, just the good old ‘don’t read and write at the same time’ adage. We humans like everything circular (our lizard brain is wired to recognise other human’s eyeys and be happy about), whereas TM1 really doesn’t like it all, anything remotely circular (rule dependencies, TIs) causes cache invalidation and massive performance degradation.

IBM have released a real treasure-trove of content in IBM Data and AI Accelerators! Most definitely have a look if you haven’t already. I only skimmed the Planning Analytics part of it (or as I call it, “Andreas Kugelmeier’s mind palace”) and it’s a very worthwhile read. I find this presentation to be a better navigation to Planning Analytics accelerators than the website itself ;)

I was just reading through Price Volume Mix analysis IBM Accelerator template and it would have been be so useful for me about 5 years back when I had to create our own template for a pharmaceutical model. Here’s some of my ramblings about it.

Had a few ’let’s improve performance’ cases recently that were all related to CellSecurity, so here’s a couple of notes on it. You’ve heard all of this before, just putting it together.

Continuing the TM1 Git story, I’ll describe how to do a simple promotion of a few objects from one server to another.

This might be slightly different from overall Git-enabled philosophy of development, but it’s a direct replacement of how TM1 promotions work in most places I see now, i.e. promoting via copying the object files to a folder and carrying it over and it’s sometimes easier to start from doing the same thing with a new tool :)

I recently had a chance to work on a very large TM1 system and one of my colleagues asked ‘so what can we learn from it?’ This question got me thinking a bit past the usual ‘just don’t do this’ banter and lead to this post.

I finally had a couple of days to play with Git integration for TM1, something I was very curious about ever since it was released in PA 2.0.7. This post describes what I’ve found so far plus the instructions on setting it up in VSCode. I hope to post more on this later.

Just realised that I’ve put tm1financelib on GitHub and didn’t tell anyone about it ;) Here it is.

I know nobody should be using Java Extension TIs as this functionality is no longer actively developed (but still supported for all PA 2.x releases), but I’m still not sure what’s the best way to replace it. The lack of built-in support for all financial calculations in TM1 never ceases to puzzle me and essentially we’ve got 3 options for their replacement: