Applied Dimensionality

IBM reworked the way approval hierarchies work quite a bit in TM1 10.2. Refreshing any changes to approval hierarchies or updating application security now requires calling a special application maintenance utility. It’s all fairly straightforward, you do the approval subset changes as usual and then run the command line to trigger app_maintenance.bat file. You can even grab a copy Infocube’s TI’s to run this utility to do it in a more ’bundled-in TM1’ approach (just don’t forget to change ExecuteCommand Wait parameter to 0 in most of them). Application maintenance works nice and easy up until you start using it against CAM secured TM1 with Single SignOn configured.

There’ll be quite a few IBM Business / Solution connect events across Australia this May:

See dates, agenda and register.

I’ll be at the ones in Sydney & Brisbane. Maybe even a bit on stage, if I can’t convince BegaCheese to do all the talking -)

I’m running our interpactice (we’ve got Singpapore and Sydney offices) TM1 sessions. Currently playing with the ‘quick / easy / conceptual puzzles’ approach. Beats my lecturing so far -)

I’ll publish some old ones in this blog, post the answers in comments or in an email on mail@ykud.com. If you can answer the question #2 for this one correctly and explain it — beer/wine is on me, I failed it.

As some of you already noticed, TM1 applications server (the java engine that drives your Contributor Applications, Operations Console and (from 10.2) TM1Web), is quite a sensitive beast. And where there’s sensitivity, there’s a need for monitoring. In this post I’ll show how to attach JConsole to TM1 Application Server for monitoring.

Got questions about cross dimensional security in TM1 Applications aka Contributor quite a few times, so it’s obviously time to write something up and put out here for linking in future ) Cross dimensional security is quite a mouthful, so for us ex-Enterprise Planning people: this is a post on how to do something like Access Tables in TM1. Don’t get overexcited, though, there’s no “good-enough” solution that I’m aware of, more like a bunch of workarounds. I’ll list them here with the pro’s and con’s of each and typical usage scenarios. I’ll pay a bit more attention to one of them (dynamic MDX-subsets with an auxiliary flag cube), cause it’s not very intuitive (for non-hardcore TM1 developers) and is actually quite useful.

Got a chance to play with maps in Cognos reports for a recent PoC and learned quite a lot in the process. Most notably, I integrated OpenStreetMap in Cognos report, so I’ll demonstrate how to do it. Looks like this:

Feature updates went largely unnoticed with BI 10.2.1 FP1 release.  It’s highly unusual to have major feature updates in fix packs, they’re usually held up to releases. But in this case we’ve got Rapid Analytical Visualisation Engine (RAVE) available in all reports, not only Active Reports (as per core 10.2.1). And that’s big news worth spreading!

If you have missed it — there’s a new edition of Stephen Few’s Information Dashboard Design book. A must have and first edition is by far most worn-out Few’s book in my collection. Almost at a point where I’d be embarrassed to ask him to sign it,just had to buy a new one ) Not that we’ll meet any time soon ( Anyways, fantastic read so far!

Got my first Coursera certificate a while ago, hooray! Got it by mistake (more on it later), but it doesn’t matter, I won’t tell anyone, whoops )

Introduction to Data Science was taught by Bill Howe from University of Washington and lasted for 8 weeks. As usual, I was very active in the first 5 weeks and dropped the ball later, when it came to peer assessed exercises. But it looks like they had some issues with grading algorithm, so it kinda said that 100% on 5 weeks was enough to get a certificate, which is fine by me.