A forray into Lumira SP12 – new features and findings

Hi Everyone,

With Lumira desktop SP12 released last week, I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce a few of the new features!

Firstly, I recorded some videos to cover the 3 main enhancements:

• New HTML 5 User-Interface ‘look-and-feel’:

• “Compose Storyboards” – create interactive, composite views of visualizations:

• Data acquisition using BW-SQL .UNX universes is now supported:

I must also mention these incremental updates:

• Improved in-product registration.
• BIP 4.1 support.
• HANA SP06 support.

I thought you’d be interested to know some of the more techy stuff I discovered recently:

1. Whilst testing, I noticed 2 additional 32-bit Lumira process showing up in the Task Manager, and I was told that this SP12 release now uses a revised      ‘Chromium’ multi-process architecture.  With the interface now rendering in HTML, this task has been decoupled from the application’s JVM ‘back-end’      process.  There are always 2 of these processes: one central/global process, one for the HTML page itself. More info here:           http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/multi-process-architecture

2. I was stress-testing the BW-SQL pretty heavily and made some interesting findings.  Firstly, I had recently upgraded my BI Platform from 4.0 SP06 to BI 4.1 SP01 and was hitting errors like “getSessionInfosEx – could not load the selected universe” (and the ‘csEX’ error below) when trying to acquire from      BI Universes:

As it transpired, my problem was related to Adaptive Processing Server (APS) configuration on the BI Platform. After updating to 4.1+ , my old 4.0 APS configuration wasn’t working with Lumira (although reporting content was fine from BILaunchPad). I suspected a problem with the Adaptive Connectivity Service. To solve the issue, I ran the CMC’s new “System Configuration Wizard” (thus recreating all APSs) and then my acquisition worked!  🙂

So now i could connect to BW-SQL universes 🙂   My next issue was when consuming very large infocubes..  I had expected some slowness as my cube had several million rows in its fact table, but eventually I hit an error:

The solution was to increase some specific parameters on the Web Intelligence Processing Server (default shown in black outline):

The crucial parameter here is the “Maximum Character Stream Size (MB)” setting.  This needs to be upped from 15 to anything between 40-100Mb (depending on the # of rows being fetched). Although this hasn’t been absolutely proven empirically, the “ball-park figures” i’m communicating are in the range of: 

• 100 000 rows -> 20 MB
• 200 000 rows -> 40 MB
• 500 000 rows -> 100 MB

3.  Unfortunately, there are a number of ‘release restrictions’ which need to be kept in mind.   The article of interest can be found here  www.service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1911965

4. If connecting to BOE XI3.1, it has come to our attention that you can see MDX OLAP .UNV (BAPI access) listed in the universe browser – but this type of data access isn’t supported!!  A bug has been logged (they should be hidden) . Many thanks to Bart Bart Verweijen  for the feedback http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-33652

5. As being discussed here http://scn.sap.com/thread/3433313 for Predictive Analysis users, there will be no SP12 release (and probably no SP13).  These applications have ‘de-couple’ temporarily, but will resume by SP14.  However, this presents a dilemma for PA SP11 users who want to use Lumira SP12 – as there’s currently no officially supported way of having the 2 products installed side-by-side..

6. *update* With regards to this old article: 1782010 – SAP Visual Intelligence 1.0: How to analyze VI processing problems using the native Debugger utility

I realized last week that this tip no longer applies in SP12!   The equivalent debugger/profiler is accessible in SP12 by double clicking on the ” – ” symbol in the status bar:

I hope this information is of use to you. 

Please feel free to ask your questions here, i’ll be happy to respond .

Kind regards,

H