MUNs and changing dimensions in TM1

[Kognize]

Request for advice.

We recently implemented TM1 and Cognos BI for a client. The client has several large TM1 cubes with constantly changing dimensions. For example the account dimension has several accounts added to the dimension and the dimension hierarchies are updated every hour. They've got a slick process for this and everything works well in the TM1/Excel land.

However, they now want to use Cognos BI for reporting the data in these constantly changing TM1 cubes, and I'm not sure if this is possible with the way BI handles MUNs based off the dimension index. There is no way I can tell the customer don't change your dimensions or constantly republish your FM packages. If this can't be cracked then BI is out!  :o

Any help/comments are much appreciated.

Cheers

H

[OLAPBPMguy]

By "Account" do you mean customer or do you mean GL Account?

GL accounts should be quite a slowly changing dimension and it would be highly unusual to have several new members and hierarchy changes every hour.  If it is a customer dimension on the other hand then I can understand that the dimension could be changing rapidly.

FM packages for TM1 cubes are still problematic in terms of lack of performance in BI vs. "native TM1" UIs and inability to deal with TM1's support for multiple aliases and attributes, multiple hierarchies, ragged hierarchies, etc.

As far as I am aware at this point there are only workarounds to the issue you are describing.  How real time do the BI reports need to be?  Would it be acceptable to have a version of the cubes for BI reporting where the dimension updates are only nightly with a nightly refresh of the FM packages?

Otherwise have you considered using the html connector to bring in EV Views (vs. Report Studio) or TM1 web cube viewer (vs. Analysis Studio).  You can get analogous results (and it's faster).