Process Worksheets - recent experience

[sarahmilius]

Has anyone run into the following situation that I found:
I am aware that Cognos has "deprecated" offering Technical Support for Process Worksheets in 9.4.... but I had a recent client upgrade from 9.0.2 with Process Worksheets to 9.4.MR1 (the client's prior license did not include Turbo-Integrator). Client continues to be Excel-centric, and had 2 PWs they wanted to retain in the upgrade.
One PW was configured for a flat file and ran successfully but significantly slowly in 9.4.
The other PW was ODBC-based (SQL view) and could not load the data to TM1 correctly. Each element "address" was truncated differently (pattern per dimension) and all intersections failed to match. SQL database permissions were in place, DSNs were fine, but no luck.

Curious if any other TM1 sites have seen this behavior (I know, I know, who would want to, there's no need, etc.)

- Thanks in advance

[David Usherwood]

Yup. One of our clients had to go to 9.4 because of moving to Office 2007 and hit the same problem. We worked with them to migrate the PWs to TI. They didn't have any ODBC-based PWs so that's a new one. Raise an SR, keep at them. PWs are still supported so should work properly.

I must also comment that I found myself at a client having to install 90SP3U9 under Vista and/or O2007 and (although not 'supported') it's actually working reasonably well. No ribbon though - I was devastated....

[sarahmilius]

Not to belabor the point (and at the risk of repeating my post from another thread), but I found the following statement buried in the 9.4 on-screen help documentation:

“Processing worksheets, while a valid means of importing data, are deprecated functionality in the current TM1 release. We strongly recommend using TurboIntegrator to import data into TM1 cubes.”

This seemed clear that support for PWs is a thing of the past.
What I could not understand is how a client without TI (on a pre-open-license version) could (or be allowed to) upgrade to 9.4, without TI "officially". I am still trying to determine how "legit" the use of TI is in their case. I believe there was an extra price tag for TI in this type of situation.

[kangkc]

Not too sure this is the problem, the fact that Excel 2007 now support 1 million rows and 16 thousand columns may be the cause of the performance issue.

You can try to create a excel process template based on Excel compatibility mode (pre-2007 format) and see if that helped in the performance. Let us know the outcome. Will be interested to find out the result.

[sarahmilius]

Excel was not the culprit in my case. I should cited it was Excel 2003 (with TM1 9.4 MR1) where I ran into the Process Worksheet issues. The data being loaded is not that extensive either, so the truncation issue was very unusual.