TM1 9.5.2 Released!

TM1 9.5.2 includes major changes that will support very large numbers of parralel users and massive improvements to performance when used as a source for Cognos 10.

Despite the small increment in the version number, (from 9.5.1 -> 9.5.2), our understanding is this is a major release with significant changes to the database locking mechanism, multi-user access and parallel processing.

We expect these changes to bring noticeable benefits to customers with high numbers of concurrent input users but, at the moment, we do not believe it will improve calculation performance which will remain single threaded.

The IBM web site lists the following benefits to this release

• Parallel interaction

A new TM1 object locking approach that increases user throughput by lessening situations that result in write transactions that are “blocked” by concurrent read and write transactions.

• Data reservation

A new TM1 cube level configuration that provides the ability for users to gain “exclusive write access” to designated data slices of a cube, preventing other users with write access updating the reserved data.

• Multi-node edit

A new TM1 Contributor capability that provides contributors and approvers the ability to perform write back on data representing more than one node in an approval hierarchy.

• TM1Top

Incremental capabilities to existing TM1Top that provide operational administrators insight into sandbox and job queue server activity.

• TM1 Widget

With IBM Cognos Business Insight conformance – TM1 Widgets support a complete set of toolbar capabilities on the IBM Cognos Business Insight toolbar. Prior releases of TM1 require the native TM1Web toolbar in the body of the Widget.

• Added five languages

Traditional Chinese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian.

• Enhanced job queuing

Job queues are processed by multiple threads when used in conjunction with parallel interaction.

• Conformance upgrade for TM1 Package Connector

The TM1 Package Connector includes conformance for IBM Cognos Business Intelligence V10.1.0 (when Fix Pack 1 is released for Cognos 10 shortly) –  (19-May-2011 – This has now been released.  Please see http://infocube.com.au/infocube-blog/cognos-101-fix-pack-1.html)

Also includes some enhancements for Cognos 8.4.1 with the use of Fix Pack 3, which is also out soon.

• Other

Support for Office 2010

Added statistical analysis features

The TM1 9.5.2 client supports Excel 2010 ( 32 bit), We think this will be important and welcome news for many of our customers (although it is not mentioned in the IBM summary).
For supported environments see https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27020888