Posts Tagged ‘CoE’

SPSS CLEM is the control Language for Expression Manipulation, which is used to build expressions within SPSS Modeler streams. CLEM is actually used in a number of SPSS “nodes” (among these are the Select and Derive nodes) and you can check the product documentation to see the extended list. CLEM expressions are constructed from: Values, […]

Another interesting feature of SPSS Modeler is its built-in ability to sample data. It is pretty typical to have (in one or more files) hundreds of thousands of records to process, and using complete sets of data during testing can take a huge amount of your time and is inefficient in terms of computer processing […]

Consider the scenario where you have to convert information held in a “categorical field” into a “collection of flag fields” – found in a transactional source. For example, suppose you have a file of transactions that includes (among other fields) a customer identifier (“who”) and a product identifier (“what”).  This file of transactional data indicates […]

Data loaded into a TM1 or SPSS model will, in most cases, include files consisting of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of records. It is not reasonable, given the number of fields and records in files of this size, for you to visually inspect all fields in every record (of every file) for missing or […]

If you’ve ever attempted to perform a performance test on a TM1 application, you know that there is not really an effective way to manually create sufficient load on a model. Getting “real users” to execute application operations – over and over again – is nearly impossible. Thankfully, an automated testing product can solve for […]

Objective Making modifications to TM1 rule files can (potentially) affect both the TM1 application and the TM1 server (that the application is running on). Rule modification or reprogramming can cause loss of data, changes in how the application responds (performance) and unexpected changes in memory consumption. In addition, it can be difficult to effectively test […]

Overview The purpose of this post is to provide a strategy for approaching and resolving a “concern” that has been identified within a application. Overall, the idea is to “add structure” to the process of responding to defects (remediation) in your application. Steps to Remediation Using a resolution methodology referred to as CERT, the steps […]

In one of my earlier posts I recommended an approach for loading larger amounts of data into TM1 applications, and provided a high-level explanation of this approach, which I call the “File Route” solution. Some More Thoughts                  I like this load-strategy because, in following best practice guidelines, it leverages TM1’s proven ETL tool, TurboIntegrator to […]

Bulk Absorption Options From a pure architectural perspective, what is sometimes referred to as “bulk uploading” sometimes is (mistakenly) considered to be part of reporting or included in the data consumption component of a TM1 application design.  Loading and/or updating data is part of an applications absorption or configurations components and should be handled with […]

I was recently asked by a former colleague of mine to help conduct an appraisal of a large scale Cognos TM1 development project that is planning on sourcing all kinds of data from a large Oracle RDMS. In addition to the “normal” review objectives (is the design appropriate? are best practices being followed? will the […]

  Establishing an organizations center of excellence (COE) takes vision and a strong commitment to overcoming obstacles.  Three common obstacles often encountered on the journey towards excellence are: Complacency, Complexity and Conservatism. Complacency Complacency is the notion that “this works, it’s manageable, so why change it?” This attitude comes from the old saying, “if it’s […]

My start-up predictive analytics organization “Predictive Performers” wants to do some internal planning. We receive extract files from an an accounting service each month that provide the total hours billed per each of our consultants, along with each consultants hourly rate. The files are saved to a folder on our network: The files also breakout […]