Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Test COG-385: IBM Cognos TM1 Master Exam

There is a new TM1 exam available called COG-385: IBM Cognos TM1 Master Exam:

http://www-03.ibm.com/certify/tests/objCOG-385.shtml

TM1Web Timeouts

The defaults timeouts on tm1web normally need extending for deployments.
The best guide I have seen is here:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21408905

and extract below:

Resolving the problem
To prevent a TM1Web session from timing out configure your Timeout Parameter according to business requirements and “precedence of timeout settings” (best practice is not to change the default parameters).
Check web.config and tm1s.cfg file timeout parameter information. Check if you have a setting in your tm1s.cfg as it could be impacting your timeout if you do (note that no entry = never timeout). IdleConnectionTimeOut Seconds specifies a timeout limit for idle client connections, in seconds.For example, if you include the line IdleConnectionTimeOutSeconds=900 in tm1s.cfg, the server disconnects idle client connections after 900 seconds.

Timeout Parameter in TM1 & Microsoft IIS & TM1Web
0. Increase timeout IdleConnectionTimeOutSeconds (tm1s.cfg) from 900 sec to 7200 sec (= 120 min)
1. Increase timeout of IIS worker process from sec (=20 min) to 7200 sec (= 120 min)
cscript %SystemDrive%\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set W3SVC/AppPools/ApplicationPoolName n
2. Increase timeout DefaultAppPool from default 20 min to 120 min
3. Increase timeout TM1 Web Session (web.config) from default 20 min to 120 min
4. httpRuntime executionTimeout="7200" (web.config)
6. restart IIS after changing timeout settings

Another category of Session Timeouts, the ones where immediately after logon (or a short time later) the Session Timeout hits the user, is due to the default setting in IIS Version 6 webserver of MS Windows Server 2003:
Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools ->IIS Manager -> Application Pool -> Default Application Pool (DefaultAppPool) -> right mouse click to open context menu, selectProperties -> tab Performance -> Web Garden: Maximum number of worker processes -> Change from default value of 4 to 1.

Friday, January 14, 2011

IBM Cognos Solution Implementation Methodology

If you are about to implement a new cognos product or a new project within an existing install then its worth checking out the CSIM roadmaps available:

 http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/services/implementation-roadmaps.html


There are roadmaps for Cognos BI and TM1 available 

Sunday, January 09, 2011

TM1 Contributor not liking an alias named Description

I quite commonly create a default alias on my dimensions with the name Description.

It would seem though that TM1 Contributor does not like this as a name for the alias on a nominated workflow hierarchy.

I could not understand why my alias was not displaying in Contributor but upon using a different name for my alias on the workflow dimension, suddenly everything came right again.

My suspicion is that there is some MDX call within Contributor that becomes invalid for some reason.

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

TM1 TI process SQL preview killing

If your TI process datasource consists of a sql statement that takes a long time to run then it will become annoying when you want to make changes to that TI and the sql executes every time you open the TI process.

There is though a simple workaround.

At the end of your sql add the to your WHERE condition “1” =’?pCondition?’




 Then in your Prolog tab at the very start add a line  pCondition = '1';


 By having the sql where clause not being populated until run time (execution of the TI) it means your TI will now open without running the SQL statement