As Business Analytics coaches at Lodestar Solutions, it’s our passion and responsibility to find and talk about products that make your job easier. Today we are going to talk about a product called TM1Compare and how it relates to another pain point in TM1 development and that is the migration process – Migration of development code or objects from a development to production environment.
Readers who are familiar with TM1 know that this is a very delicate and tedious process. TM1 is made of various objects that store the data in a structure. Cubes are made with dimensions & rules and dimension are made up of elements, subsets, and attributes. All these objects are stored in a file structure called the data directory which also includes the data. You might ask, “How does TM1 store all the data in a directory?” The reason TM1 can do that is because TM1 only stores data on disk at the leaf level. The rest of the data, such as consolidated data and rule based data, is calculated and stored in memory on server startup. That is where TM1 gets its speed.
So going back to the subject of migration, in order to migrate these objects from one environment to another, all you have to do is bring down the TM1 server, copy the objects from the one directory to another and when you bring up the server…your changes are there. The problem with this process is that it is prone to error and is not very transparent. So as Business Intelligence coaches, we have made it our mission to introduce transparency where there is none. In this effort to look for ideas and products that take care of pain points and today, let us now talk about one such product called TM1Compare from CarpeDatum Consulting Inc.
Tm1Compare allows you to compare items from two TM1 servers at the object level so you can compare Cubes, dimensions and TI processes. You can compare sub-objects like rules, views, subsets and attributes. TM1Compare doesn’t only compare the objects but also the content of those objects. An example would be the actual subset existing in the compared environments but all the elements within that subset. That is an extremely valuable and great feature. Another feature that we love is that when the difference has been identified, you can drill down and go to the exact location of the difference. For instance, if a rule was different, you can click on the rule node and that will open up a side by side of the two rules and highlight the exact location of the difference. That is a huge time saver. You can use comparison utility of your choice in TM1Compare like CodeCompare & WinCompare and they integrate with TM1Compare. Once you have compared, you can migrate the objects between the environments by either doing a straight migrate without bringing down the servers or create a migration package, which would be an option for a project with high levels of data governance requirements.
You can explore all what we have discussed and more the CarpeDatum Website: http://www.carpedatuminc.com/products/