On November 20, 2019, Gary Owen, the Chief Product Strategist for Compass, MITS, and Tour de Force hosted a webinar to go over some of the new features available in this release of MITS Discover. The video is above.
During the webinar, there were several questions that came up. We've collected those here and present them with answers below.
Q: How do we get the update?
A: MITS will need to do at least some of the upgrade process and switch over to the new engine. Reach out to support@mits.com to get a ticket started for the upgrade. If you have already done so but have not heard back, please be patient. There are many requests for help with these upgrades and we are working through them as fast as we can.
Q: We've upgraded to version 2019 R2. How do we know if our system is compatible with the new architecture?
A: During the upgrade process, MITS will run the new Compatibility Checker to see if there are any customizations which will need to be addressed prior to enabling the new engine.
Q: With no preset drilldown paths needed in the product, how are drilldown fields selected?
A: While the need for prebuilt drilldown paths is no longer a requirement with the new engine, the identifiers (fields of the drilldown path) must still be predefined as part of the extraction process. This hasn't changed.
Q: Can you tell me more about how the No Data Rows feature works?
A: When a cell has No Data (is null), it will display in MITS Discover as a blank space. In the past this would have been represented by a zero. Zeros no longer mean there is no data to display for that cell. When you do see a zero, there are transactions for that cell which total up to zero.
If you have a sort or filter on a column which is not on the report, that sort or filter is still factored into determining the “No Data Row”. For example, if you are sorting by Sales Year to Date but only displaying Sales This Month, you may see rows with blank data because MITS Discover is also inspecting the Sales Year to Date column for data even though it's not displayed on the report.
Q: When exporting a report with No Data cells to Excel, will that change the way Excel's calculations on those cells?
A: When a cell in MITS Discover has no data, the cell is exported to as an empty cell during the conversion to the Excel format. This should have no impact on calculations in Excel.
Q: What changes have you made to MITS Report?
A: There were no changes to MITS Report in this release other than a minor driver update.
Q: Are there and changes or improvements to column customization?
A: While the new engine does make changes to the way we store and present column data, there were no new column features added in this release.
Q: Will the new engine handle dynamic changes like TODOs, UNDOs, and REDOs?
A: No. The new engine preforms full rebuilds of the hypercubes. However, because of the performance increase, this eliminates the need to only do partial changes to the hypercube.
Q: Do the old PICK options, like CLIP-EONS, still work?
A: Because MITS is no longer storing hypercube data in PICK, there is no longer a need (or use) for things like CLIP-EONS. The whole hypercube is rebuilt during each build. If the build range on a cube needs to be adjusted, Support would make those changes elsewhere in the hypercube's configuration.
Q: Can you have more than one Fused group at a time? Can you rename a Fused group?
A: No. But both are good suggestions and are on the product roadmap.
Q: What features were removed in new version?
A: Most of the features and tools which were removed in this version were "under the hood" changes a user or administrator would never see. However, there are a few to make note of.
- Zero Rows has been replaced by No Data Rows.
- MITS.MAKER.BUILD, MITS.LOAD, and the Java Cube Builder don't work on the new engine.
- Incremental updates and dynamic changes are no longer available.
- PICK language expressions in column expressions and other places will no longer work.
- Performance of pagination on grid reports has slowed.
- Override hypercube status has been removed.
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