You can download the new version from our downloads page. You will also find a new version of our manual, reference and online documentation on our documentation page. Read this article to learn some details about the new version 2.6.1 and to read its release notes.

New features

Improved renderers

The new version contains new and faster renderers for the HTML, Excel and PDF output. In difference to the output of the PDF renderer, which generates output equal to its previous version, the HTML renderer now generates a much more compressed result. Especially for the Internet Explorer, this reduces the load and display time for HTML reports significant.

Additionally, the new HTML renderer offers some new formatting options:

• Scrollable tables with fixed headers: Before in the only available in the analyzer, tables in normal reports can now also contain fixed headers and scrollbars. The new HTML renderer will automatically display every table as scrollable table which is placed inside a block with fixed width and height properties set.
• Free positioning of blocks: For each block you may assign a fixed X/Y position and place them everywhere on the screen you want to.
• The automatic expansion of blocsk to make them all equal with can be manually switched of now.
• Charts are now automatically expanded to the size of their owning blocks and therefore zoomed when blocks are expanded because of other and larger blocks in the report.

The Excel renderer also contains some new features. E.g. automatically generates foreground and background colors for negative numbers or exceptions are now included in the Excel export and all original datatypes of the cells are preservered when exporting a document.

Print preview

The report viewer now contains a new “Print preview” button which shows the report in a printable PDF version directly inside the browser. This allows to print a report without exporting it into the PDF format before. To use this feature, your browser must have installed the Adobe PDF plugin.

Hideable explorers

A new button in the upper right corner of the portal allows to hide the explorer bar at the left side of the portal and to gain more space for the reports or other viewers.

Improved expression editor

The expression editor, which is used e.g. to edit formulas or header iterations in the Analyzer, has widely changed and offers a number of new dialogs for searching, sorting, navigating etc. in dimensions without using the keyboard and manually typing expression.

There is a detailled description of the expression editor in our also new manual for the version 2.6.1.

A new storage model for stores

When creating a store you can now choose between two storage models for their data: The known “Condensed” format and the new “Indexed” format, which is much fast in building high-dimensional stores but slower in reading data out of stores. With a good combination of condensed and indexed stores, you can now create offline version of really high dimensional cubes by creating the most used combination of dimension as condensed stores and additionaly storing the “complete” view of the cube in a indexed store.

To learn more about the new storage type, read the new store property description in our new reference for version 2.6.1.

Release Notes

22.10.2009: Release 2.6.1

Server

• A new function ISLEAF was added
• Less logging, e.g. for unknown tables while editing configurations
• Now match filters for cubes can contain expressions of any complexity
• Imported dimensions now use less memory and CPU than before
• The limits for number keyloader have been lowered, both limits can be negative now and the start-limit has no longer to be less than the end-limit
• Unknown keys are now mapped to the root key when loading a cube into an offline store (but they still generate warnings). This brings the behavior closer to online cubes, because the root key of dimension always reflect the total of the database content, independent of all keys being mapped to the dimension.
• A new storage model for stores, the “Indexed” storage, allows to create stores for high-dimensional cubes. Though the indexed storage is slower than the previous “condensed” model, its build time does not grows exponential with the number of included dimensions.
• Line breaks in escaped SQL statements (@”…..”) are now allows and will no longer irritate the Database server.
• Unmappable keys are mapped to the root key of a dimension when loading a cube into a store. This equals the root value of the dimension to the online version of the cube.

• Bugfix: A possible deadlock while using a corrupt dimension was fixed
• Bugfix: Mappings with “mode = select” did not appear in the result sometimes
• Bugfix: Multiple mappings for the same fact now also work with DLOOKUP
• Bugfix: The GROUP BY clause was constructed wrong if a statement contained
  equal expressions and used the “Group by indices” option.

Web-Frontend

• New and faster renderers for HTML, Excel and PDF output
• A strong compression for the HTML output was added, now cells with similar styles are clustered into CSS classes
• A new “Print preview” was added to the report viewer now. The preview displays reports as PDF files inside the portal and allows to print reports without exporting them before.
• User can now hide the explorers at the left side of the portal
• Now ThinUsers can also delete their private files and snapshots
• Now negative numbers are also colored red when exported to Excel
• New placeholders for filenames in automations have been added (%USER% etc)
• Empty rows and columns are now removed from the result set and no longer displayed as rows or columns with the height or width 0
• Input fields and links became much more performant, reports with thousands of input fields are now possible
• Assertions are now also displayed in Excel and PDF exports
• The selected tab in the tabbed orientation is now highlighted
• Dialogs are movable now
• Window titles are limited to 30 characters now
• Improved drag and drop behavior which now also works if the user drags an item very fast or if the browser reacts slowly
• The table editor in the Pivot viewer does no longer disappear when changing the format to “chart”.
• The “save as” dialog now also shows where the user has no write access if one of the subfolders is accessible.
• The Excel export now preserves the data types and exports all texts as text, even if it is convertible to a number.
• There is no need to create access rules for the bookmarks or snapshots folder any more.

• Bugfix: Headers nested under spanned headers are now no longer too wide or too heigh
• Bugfix: The snapshot and automation folders no longer need manual set access rights
• Bugfix: The font-color was not exported to Excel correctly
• Bugfix: Removing sorts in the Analyzer now works
• Bugfix: Like for other formats, the XML export is now only offered after the report was displayed
• Bugfix: Long URLs caused problems in IE and are now replaced by simple numbers
• Bugfix: EMail attachments always had “.pdf” extension when send directly out of the report viewer.
• Bugfix: Sorting a row or column in the pivot viewer (using the context menu of a header) now also works with scrolled tables.
• Bugfix: The content of search selectors and input fields can now be selected.

Workbench

• The Workbench no longer locks when waiting for a model load or reload
• The ERM view became faster and uses a cached version of the database-schema when displaying the links
• Invisible keys and facts now appear in the cube editor
• Invisible dimensions now appear in the dimension preview
• A new background property was added for queries
• The column widths in the property editor are no longer reset when a new element is selected
• The previewer now also works on all Windows 64 bit systems

• Bugfix: The password for automations can now be edited and changed

Console

• A new argument now allows to kill an existing session for a named user

Related posts

• Release 2.5.1 (0)
• What’s new in 2.6? (0)
• Release 2.5.2 (0)
• Release 2.6.0 (0)
• instantOLAP 2.5.0 (0)

If you haven’t read about 2.6 before, have a look into our previous article Whats new in 2.6?. At a glance, the new version has some nice frontend improvements, it is faster and uses less memory, it is easier to use and it contains less restrictions. Read the release notes in this article for a complete list of all improvements and fixes.

And the new version contains a free administrator license for each new or existing customer. This also means, you will no longer need to request an evaluation license if you want to download and test instantOLAP. Just download the software, install it and start using the it without any time limit.

Release notes

19.08.2009: Release 2.6.0

Server

• The rebuild of dimensions and stores (former offline cubes) is now synchronized and executed in the same transacation, now stores are immediatley rebuild if any of their dimensions change and are publish at the same time as their dimension. Therefore, stores can now longer become “outaged” as in previous versions.
• The size of ToDo-lists is no longer limited as before, the “Query too complex” can no longer appear. Also, the ToDo processing now is 100% faster and uses exponential less memory.
• Imported dimension use less memory now and are synchronized faster. Imported models are therefore automatically started whenever an importing model is started.
• Models can now be shut down while they are synchronizing their dimensions or stores
• Less overall memory consumption
• File caches are now automatically deleted an re-initialized whenever they are corrupted
• New MDX-Functions and operators: UniqueName and StrToElement
• Now, calculated MDX members with other return types than “Set” are also supported

• Bugfix: The JOIN operator returned an empty result if the first argument was a single value and the user had no access-rights for this value
• Bugfix: The stores can now also contain non-aggregated facts and aggregate  them manually
• Bugfix: Sometimes the ROWNUM function displayed “0″ in each row

Web-Frontend

• Two new selector types have been added to the frontend: Calendar ranges and SuggestBox (which offer possible options while the user types into the box)
• Selector groups have a new property “Popup” which allows to convert a group into a space saving popup selector
• Negative values are now also colored red in the Excel export
• Better performance for Input selectors
• The repository no longer collapses when beeing refreshed
• New properties have beed added for overlay charts and allow display multiple ranges within the same chart
• The metrics for tables (needed cell-width and heights) are now calculated more accurate
• A fixed snapshot folder can now be set up for the frontend. If used, the users automatically save their snapshots in this folder without beeing asked for a file path before (like in version 2.2)

• Bugfix: The Excel export threw an error if the left padding of a cell was defined as double value
• Bugfix: The current value of input fields was not exported to PDF or Excel files
• Bugfix: Sended files did always have the extension “.pdf”, independet of their type
• Bugfix: The save as dialog now only shows folder with admin access for the current user
• Bugfix: The login dialog now also forgets the last user name even if the “remember user” option is not selected.
• Bugfix: The access-rights for the bookmark folder “.boomarks” are now ignored, every user can store data here
• Bugfix: The bookmark editor was messed up for arguments with multiple values
• Bugfix: The input selector now matches all result-elements again its options
• Bugfix: The Browser shows no longer endless “loading” after an empty query was executed
• Bugfix: The frontend offered edit rights for a folder if only some of the contained files was editable but not the folder itself

Workbench

• A complete new structure for offline cubes was introduced: Now cubes can contain as many “stores” as you want, each with a different combination of dimensions and fact. The configuration of stores is much easier than before,  just add dimensions and facts using checkboxes to the store and determine  their aggregation type (if wanted) – thats it.
• Cubes can now optionally still exist even if an offline version (store) of  them is active. In this case, the online cube is listed *behind* its offline versions.
• A new “Notes” was added to the configuration editor and allows administrators  to add notes to their configuration files
• The process manager now shows the current progress of a progress
• A new “Edit” button was added to the model manager which allows to open the configuration editor for a specific model directley from the manager
• The model-info now displays the number of warnings and error for a store in the cube tab
• The auto mapping for dimensions is no longer stored in the dimension itself and still keeps valid even if a dimension structure has changed
• Virtual tables (aliases) and virtual columns (expression) now have their own  symbol in the database explorer to make them visible for the administrator
• A new refactoring was added which deletes all references (links etc) using an  table-alias after the alias was deleted

• Bugfix: If you start a model out of the model-info panel, the panel now waits until the model was loaded
• Bugfix: The preview inside the Workbench displayed “Unknown host” if the  server wasn’t able to resolve its own domain-name.
• Bugfix: The mousewheel now also works while the mouse stands over the mapping panels in the cube editor
• Bugfix: Drag&Drop did no longer work after a user was moved in the user  manager
• Bugfix: When a configuration was changed and saved, the new dimension version have published to the productive model. This still happens but cannot block  the Workbench any more when waiting for a model lock.
• Bugfix: The mouswheel function in the ERM editor now works vice versa (moving the wheel forward zooms into the chart)
• Bugfix: The properties of the currently selected element are still displayed after clicking onto a database or repository element

Related posts

• What’s new in 2.6? (0)
• instantOLAP 2.5.0 (0)
• Release 2.5.3: Connect Excel and other ODBO / XML/A clients with instantOLAP (0)
• Release 2.5.2 (0)
• Release 2.5.1 (0)

New selector types

Two new types of selectors were added to the frontend: Interval calendars and suggest boxes.

Interval calendars allow to select a time-range (from date / to date) using the calendar known from the original calendar selector. The interval selector shows two calendars, on to select the start and one to select the end date of the interval.

The suggest box offers the user valid input options while he types into its text box. This is well known from other web 2.0 applications.

Popup selectors

Selector groups can now be turned into popup selectors by setting their new property “Popup” to true. Popup selectors only appear as a small and space saving button. By clicking onto this button, the user can open or close the selector group and use its contained selectors.

Stores: Easier offline cubes

One of the main features of the new version is the much easier handling of stores. Unlike before, where cubes could be converted into offline cubes by setting some properties and setting the wanted dimension into the offline state, the cubes now can contain one or more store. Each of this stores defines a number of contained dimensions and facts, whereby different stores can contain different combinations of dimensions and / or facts and there is no need to copy cubes for different combinations in future.

The configurations of stores with the Workbench became easier and more intuitive: Simply add a new store to a cube by using its context menu and add dimensions and facts to the new store by clicking onto it. The Workbench will now automatically do all needed settings for your, e.g. by loading the lowest level of a dimension if you want to roll it up.

Better transaction model for Models and Cubes

The rebuilding of dimensions is now more connected to cubes than before. Everytime a dimension is rebuild, all stores being dependend on this dimension will be automatically also rebuild in the same transaction if the dimension has chaned. “In the same transaction” means, the user will not see changed dimensions and cubes before both are finally loaded and commited. The advantage of this new transaction model is, that cubes can no longer reach the “outaged” state if dimension changed and the cube was not scheduled to rebuild directly after.

Improved ToDo list management

The internal ToDo lists – which instantOLAP uses to determine where to load which result cell from – became much faster and less limited. The overall performance improvement is round about factor 2 when generating and resolving the list. And, because the new implementation nearly uses any memory, there is also no limit for the maximum size of ToDo lists from version 2.6. Therefore, the “query too complex” message, which appeared when building reports with too much cells, will no longer appear.

Related posts

• Release 2.5.2 (0)
• instantOLAP 2.5.0 (0)
• Release 2.6.0 (0)
• Release 2.6.1 (0)
• Release 2.5.1 (0)

New key features

New selector types

We added two new  selector-types to the frontend: Multiple Hierarchy-Trees and Expression-Selectors.

Multiple Hierarchy-Trees are equal to normal Hierarchy-Trees, but allow to select more than one key (or no key). The usage is simply: Just switch your selector type to “Multiple Hierarchy-Tree”, set the default-expression if needed, and the selector will behave like the multiple-selector (but allows to select elements from different levels).

Expression-Selectors allow the end-user to build their own expressions or formulas and to use them in queries. This new selector uses the new Expression Editor, which is also integreated into the pivot tables for editing iterations, formulas and other expressions. The expression selector must have a name and will pass the expression as string parameter to the query.

Control your pivot tables with the new Expression Editor

The new editor has also been integrated into the pivot table editor: Users can now edit iterations and formulas of headers (which define the content of the X- or Y-axis) or the options and default-selections for selectors. This brings the pivot-editor a step closer to the flexibility of the Workbench query-editor.

New layout options for pivot tables

Both pivot-tables and queries offer some new layout properties: In pivot-tables, users can now rotate header-texts like in queries and save some space in tables with many columns.

New for both types of reports are the fixed headers, which allows users to define the scrolling part of a pivot-table. When setting the table properties “fixed rows” and “fixed columns”, the pivot-table will only scroll the part right or below the defined column or row. Pivot users can do this very comfortable by using the context menu on a header.

This also works for the Excel export: The fixed rows and columns will also be fixed whenever a query or pivot-table is exported to excel.

Version check for clients

Starting with version 2.5.2, the server checks the client version more accuratley and denies access from incompatible client. The Workbench 2.5.2 displays a “Incompatible client version” error if you try to connect a 2.5.1 server or earlier.

Generally we recommend to use the Webstart-Version of the Workbench – this keeps all users in your company updated whenever you update your instantOLAP server. To install the Webstart-Version, simple enter the url “http://<server>:<port>/iolapWorkbench” to install the version. This tracks keeps automatically for updates on your server.

Release notes

================================================================================
instantOLAP relasenotes
================================================================================

04.05.2009: Release 2.5.2

Server

- The server now checks the version of connecting clients and denies access from
 outaged client versions
- SQL-KeyLoaders can now contain more than one attributes with the same name
- Better compression for dimension- and cube-files
- Better optimizing and performance for expressions
- The functions HASKEYS, HASLEVEL, HASUSER and HASROLES now expect at least one
 argument (instead of zero or more)
- Smaller ToDo-Lists for queries
- "Blocked replacements" can optionally be raised as error if the configuration
 is configured for. The Workbench also contains a new switch. Future versions
 of instantOLAP will raise blocked replacements as errors by default.
- Lookups with more than one facts now works and finds all keys having data for
 at least one of the facts
- Offline cubes are now also reported as "outaged" if the number of loaded facts
 has changed
- The model-explorer and dimension-preview now displays the ID in brackets and
 the display-text as main-text
- Facts can now also be accessed with the syntax <Fact-Dimension>:<Fact>(...),
 e.g. Fact:Amount()
- The new functions XML2ASCII converts XML and HTML texts into plain text

- Bugfix: Interrupted queries did distroy log-listeners
- Bugfix: Aliases can now use more than one table (eg in their Where-clause)
- Bugfix: The expression in the drilldown-iterations are now added to the ToDo-
 List
- Bugfix: Empty access lists for folders denied the access for all users, now
 they are treated like non-existing lists
- Bugfix: Too many levels (>500) in dimensions caused corrupted dimension-files
- Bugfix: The relogin for named users did not work if they were mapped to
 concurrent licenses
- Bugfix: Large lists operated by DISTINCT caused an error

Web-Frontend

- The analyzer now allows editing header-iterations, selector-options, -defaults
 and other expressions with the new expression-editor
- The text of headers inside the analyzer can now be rotated and display
 vertically
- The type of selectors in the analyzer can now be changed using the context-
 menu
- Rows and columns can be fixed inside the analyzer
- The analyzer now allows to create empty headers with the corners context-menu
- Sorting rows and columns inside the analyzer is now an options in the header
 context-menu
- Charts are now displayed as applets by default again
- Invisible rows and columns are no longer displayed in charts
- A default mail "from" for automation-mails can now be configured for the web-
 frontend
- External export-formats can now be configured for queries
- The automation-manger now allows to trigger automations for queries with
 exceptions
- A new multiple hierarchie-tree selector was introduced
- A new expression-selectors allows end-user to enter expressions and to filter
 dimensions manually
- Expressions can be saved and reloaded inside the expression-editor
- Charts can now contain two axis with different ranges
- Export-Tasks now allow the patterns %TIMESTAMP%, %TITLE%, %NAME% and %AUTHOR%
 in filenames
- Send-Tasks can now also contain the body-text for the generated mails
- The selector bar is now limited in its height (maximum 50% of the window-
 height) and contains a vertical-scrollbar if neccesary
- The portal is no longer visible after a user logged out and while the login
 dialog is visible
- The attachment name of queries send with the "Send" button is now the filename
 of the query and not "Pivot"
- The row-heights for queries and pivot-tables are now calculated more
 accuratley, pivot tables now always have the same height for the header and
 body sections
- Improved drag&and drop for the pivot editor

- Bugfix: The range-selector now also works for the analyzer
- Bugfix: The calender-selector was not able to select months
- Bugfix: The default for hierarchy-trees did not work
- Bugfix: Input-fields trigger a submit when pressing enter inside the Internet-
 Explorer
- Bugfix: Some snapshot could not be opened
- Bugfix: Bookmarks now also check the access-rights for target-queries after
 they have been created
- Bugfix: HTML files now use iso-8859-1 as default charset
- Bugfix: The week was displayed wrong in the calendar
- Bugfix: The calendar-selector caused timeouts in the Internet-Explorer when
 changing the month
- Bugfix: Rotated texts had problems with umlauts
- Bugfix: Constant selectors now display the text instead of the ID of the keys
- Bugfix: Constant selectors without options raised an error
- Bugfix: Selectors without selections do not trigger their default selection if
 the contained a selection before
- Bugfix: Some small stylesheet changes (space between checkbox-selectors and
 their labels, text-flow for icons in cells, query titles are displayed with
 100% width, the progress bar in notifications is smaller and others)
- Bugfix: The Excel export now only formats cells which are formatted in the
 query, too
- Bugfix: The width, height and color properties for selector groups are now
 implemented
- Bugfix: Invisible rows and columns are now totally invisible and do not cause
 layout problems
- Bugfix: Self-linked queries with link-arguments did not pass values other than
 dimensions

Workbench

- Better color-coding for progress-bars (the percentage has now a different
 color than the bar)
- Improved display for the Log-Window
- Color-Properties now accept drag&drop of colors from the model-explorer
- A new text-editor dialog allows to edit plain texts outside the property-table
- Improved vizualisation of tables and columns in the ERM diagram
- The ERM diagram did scroll in the wrong direction when using drag&drop
- The "Line Width" property for charts now accepts String as arguments (as
 descripted in the documentation)
- SQL-queries now use the same perfomant database-model as the config-editor
- The new MS SQL-Server-Driver is now offered in the driver-list when creating
 new connections
- Unsaved content in the automation-manager is now alerted
- Windows can be arranged cascading with the "Windows" menu
- Selectors now have a minimal width in the query-editor
- Format-properties (e.g. date patterns and decimal formats) are checked by
 the property editor
- The chart-format (Bar, Pie etc) is now a block-property and can be edited or
 calculated
- The default value for the cron pattern of offline stores is now empty
- After a user session was killed, the Workbench asks the user to close

- Bugfix: Log entries with more than 1024 are now displayed correctley
- Bugfix: The preview always used English as language
- Bugfix: A missing DLL was added for the Windows distribution of the Workbench
- Bugfix: Edited links are now updated in the ERM diagram
- Bugfix: A new created alias can now be dragged into the ERM diagram without
 reopening the configuration
- Bugfix: Changing the aggregation of facts with the context-menu now removes
 the "DISTINCT" of previous aggregations
- Bugfix: The model-selector in the new query wizard is no longer larger than
 the dialog
- Bugfix: After copying a file with drag&drop the Workbench no longer shows a
 confirm dialog with the wrong text

Related posts

• Release 2.6.0 (0)
• Release 2.5.1 (0)
• instantOLAP 2.5.0 (0)
• Release 2.6.1 (0)
• What’s new in 2.6? (0)

To download the new version use the links on our updated download page.

26.01.2009: Release 2.5.1

Server:

• Improved performance when building offline cubes.
• Offline cubes now have a “granularity” property with which you can control if small aggregations with < granularity values will be performed adhoc when executing a query instead when building the store. This reduces the offline size and build-duration in exchange for query-execution performance.
• The new property “Use Offline Aggregation” allows to send queries without anyaggregation or group by when building a offline-store. This can be very helpful when load base-level data from a database.
• The property “Offline SQL Fetch Size” allows to limit the number of SQL rows kept in the memory. Some database will load the complete SQL result in memory if this property is not set and this can cause memory-trouble.
• The “Offline aggreation” property for facts allows to set the aggregation type for facts manually. With this property it is also possible to aggregate facts using “COUNT DISTINCT”, e.g. by summarizing them.
• The internal database-system has been refactored.
• The new operator “!” is now usable as shortcut for the NOT function.
• The expression-parser first compares dimension-names instead of function-names with expression. This allows to use dimensions with names equal to functions,  however the function then becomes unreachable.
• The function “DRILLLEVEL” is now useable inside drilldown-iterations which makes it much easier to implement cross-dimensional drilldowns.
• A new function “COALESCE” was intruduced and returns the first non-null value of all its arguments.
• The default omit-factor for dimension-mappings (in SQL cubes) is now 0.75.
• The name of the “.license” file can now be configured in the web.xml of the backend. Change the property if you want to share a repository between iolap-servers with different versions.
• Bugfix: The expression-optimizer had a performance leak when optimizing long join lists.
• Bugfix: Using “Suppress rows” and sort-properties in header could cause problems.

Web-Frontend:

• A new search explorer was added to the explorers at the left border. This explorer allows to search for queries by their name.
• Input-fields now inherit the background-color, font etc. from their containing field.
• Exported Excel sheets now have fixed headers.
• Hierarchy-Selector now use the dimension-root as default if no other default was set (to be compatible with 2.2.x).
• Bugfix: Link-Targets “_blank” now open new tabulators for the target-page.
• Bugfix: Exporting reports wasnt able when they contained umlauts in their  title.

Workbench:

• The Workbench now comes with an integrated FireFox Browser for better cross platform compability.
• A new “Span body” property for Pivot-Tables now allows to span also the inner content of a table.
• Bugfix: The preview didn’t work with reports located in the root-folder of the repository.
• Bugfix: The preview-session timed out after a couple of minutes and are now kept alive like “normal” web-sessions.

Related posts

• instantOLAP 2.5.0 (0)
• What’s new in 2.6? (0)
• Release 2.6.0 (0)
• Release 2.6.1 (0)
• Release 2.5.2 (0)

Existing customers of the previous version 2.2 with an upgrade contract will need new license keys to install the new version. Ask your reseller, or contact us directly on info@instantolap.com, for your new keys. For a test installation, you can also request a 2.5 evaluation license on our license request page, which includes a free 30 day license for 3 users. Of course, new customers and all other interested users can also create a test license.

Your instantOLAP team

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