General Support and Upgrade Principles

Contents

Introduction

This section called 'Analysis Models - Support and Upgrade Process' gives information and guidelines related to the support and upgrade process of the Analysis Models.

Note: The Analysis Models were formerly known as IFS BI Analysis Package.

Note: Related example content in the Analysis Models and IFS BI Analysis Package, such as SSRS and Power BI reports, are not supported.


General Modification and Installation Principles

Note: The below described installation and modification principles are recommendations from IFS Product Development.

Correct Code at Component Level

All modifications to the code should be done at component level.
This means that bug corrections or customizations should be made in customer specific versions of the Analysis Models components.
When handling SSIS, SSAS and SSRS implementations/modifications, a common way is to first use the instance specific code related to a test environment. When the modifications are okay it is important to perform the corrections at the component level in order to update the customer code base. Always try to build a new test instance home with modified code, e.g. core+customizations, and test against this environment as well (as far as possible). It should be possible, at any time, to take the source code in the code repository and re-create the customer's BI environment.
The planning for implementation in the production environment can start when the test environment work as expected.

IFS Build Home and BI Instance Home

The installation and deployment, to SQL Server, with the purpose to create one specific BI instance, should be performed from a BI Instance Home. The BI Instance Home contains the consolidated code from all chosen components.

The Analysis Models Installer, which is available in the Analysis Models, is creating such a BI Instance Home. The installer builds from the IFS Build Home structure, which is created by the IFS Configuration Builder, using component specific code as input.

The code should preferably be re-built to a new parallel BI Instance Home after having made modifications to the code base. This BI Instance Home should be the base for testing.
After successful testing the BI Instance Home of the production environment can be re-built. Another possibility is to create a completely new instance home for the production environment and manually move the differences from the new to the current instance home. Thereafter the deployment of components and running the ETL process must be handled.

SSAS Modifications

For SSAS modifications, remember to build the Visual Studio project to get the updated .asdatabase file. This file is used by the Analysis Models Installer.