timeXtender 4.4: LATEST DATA WAREHOUSE,

OLAP CUBE, AND ETL FEATURES

 

timeXtender 4.4 includes features that makes it even easier to create data warehouses, ETL, and OLAP cubes. It also includes the CubeStore - a delivery mechanism that our partners can market their standard solutions to customers worldwide.

 

 

CubeStore

This release includes the new CubeStore, which offers state of the art delivery of pre-built BI solutions. The CubeStore is a new market place where partners can upload standard solutions and market them to other timeXtender partners or customers. It is all based on a new, encrypted project format and software activation to protect the intellectual property rights of our partners. For details, take a look at the video Introducing the CubeStore.

 

 

 

 

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Project Connection Manager

A connection manager has been added providing one location where all connections to data sources, staging- and data warehouse databases, as well as OLAP databases within a project can be managed. This is especially useful when importing projects either from XML files or the new online CubeStore.

 

 

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SAP Adapter - alpha

This release of timeXtender includes an alpha version of the first areas of SAP application level connectivity. The adapter is based on SAP certified technology and works with all R/3 based versions of SAP from release 4.0B, including mySAP, All-In-One and ECC. Contact timeXtender for more details.
 

Select during preview

You can now select data while you are previewing a table, and you can choose the number of records to display for a given preview. For details, take a look at the video Extracting data from a data source.

 

 

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Drag and drop creation of dimensions and measures

A new set of drag and drop features have been added for even easier creation of dimensions. You simply drag tables to create entire dimensions or drag fields to create dimension levels. The same applies to cubeswhere you can easily create measures by dragging tables or fields. If relationships exist between tables at data warehouse level you are prompted whether you want to use these on the dimensions and cubes as well. For details, take a look at the videos Creating dimensions and Creating measures.
 

Dimension enhancements

Creating a parent-child dimension based on a consolidation table is now a one-step only operation. In the Create dialog you name the dimension and choose a source consolidation table. The dimension will be created with all the proper settings for custom rollup, unary operator, and so on. For details, take a look at the video Creating consolidation tables.
 

Referenced dimensions

Support for referenced dimensions has been added for more flexibe and advanced dimension modeling. This feature has been added to the existing modeling capabilities of regular (balanced) dimensions, ragged (unbalanced) dimensions, parent-child dimensions, time dimensions, shell dimensions, many to many dimensions, star- and snowflake schema, and SCD type I, II and III.
 

Easier dimension linking

Fact and dimension linking in cubes has become even easier because it is now possible to filter on either a single dimension or a single fact table. This is particularly useful when working with complex cubes with many dimensions and/or fact tables.
 

Merge deployment of OLAP databases

To overcome a limitation in the standard Microsoft tools, you can now merge multiple timeXtender projects into the same SSAS database during deployment. This can also be used with multiple OLAP servers in the same project to avoid the default overwrite behavior.
 

New transformation functions

To deal with one of the common challenges with legacy systems, we have added a new transformation feature to clean non-display characters. This allows simple configuration of single character- or string sequence replacement. Functions have also been added to get only the date- or time part of a field value or to reverse the sign of a numeric value.
 

New condition operators

The following new operators have been added: Is numeric, Is not numeric, Is date, Is not date.
 

Custom tables on staging area

Custom tables can now be added to the table collection on staging area databases. This can, for example, be combined with custom data, the new guard function, lookups, or custom SQL functions in the data cleansing process.

 

ADO.NET number of rows parameter

To avoid “out of memory” problems when transferring very large tables using ADO.NET, a new parameter has been added to manage the batch size.
 

Custom selection rules

A new table level selection rule has been added to allow custom WHERE clauses to be used during extraction from data sources or during transfer to data warehouse databases. This can be combined with the existing field level selection rules and incremental selection rules.
 

System fields

A new option on tables in the staging area and the data warehouse databases enables visibility of system fields in timeXtender. The system fields contain an identity column, a batch number, name of source, and date/time the record was loaded. The default option to show or hide system fields is set at project level, but can be overwritten on a per table basis.
 

Documentation enhancements

In timeXtender, object descriptions are stored in Rich Text Format. A new option allows you to choose how the descriptions are represented. They can be added as attachments, displayed as pure text, or entirely excluded from the generated PDF document.

 

timeXtender 4: features in earlier releases

Feature overview timeXtender 4 (pdf).

Technical overview

timeXtender demo videos