Improve Data Transfer between Different TM1 Servers

TM1 does not a user friendly and easy mechanism to transfer data between different TM1 servers. Currently there are 2 options, but none of them can be properly used:

1 - Use Replication to transfer and synchronize data from different TM1 servers: This option is not useful if data is not manually entered in TM1 and recorded via transaction logs. If source data is calculated via rules and consolidations, then it does not work. If source data is transferred to TM1 cube via TI process without logging, then it does not work. Therefore this option is not useful in 90% of the cases.

2 - Using ODBO as data source in a TI process. This option is not user friendly at all because it works via MDX queries. It never worked for our requirements.

For clients who use TM1 for various purposes, for the sake of operation and for the sake of best performance, we use separate TM1 servers for different applications or solutions. For example, budgeting application can be in a different TM1 server than operational reporting application. There may be various reasons to have different TM1 server for different TM1 applications.

In such cases, we usually need to transfer data from one TM1 server to another TM1 server. For example, we may need to transfer high level budget figures to an operation reporting application to support some budget figures in reports. On the other hand we may need to transfer summary of calculated actual figures from an operation reporting application to a budget application that lie in different TM1 server.

Currently we have to export data from a source TM1 server to a text file or to a database and then ready it by destination TM1 server from the exported location. This makes it more difficult and time consuming to develop, as the current built in options in TM1 does not provide a proper solution to this common requirement.