Release 5.51

ADVIZOR Analyst Edition 5.51 Release Notes

January 12, 2010

ADVIZOR Solutions, Inc ADVIZOR Version 5.51 Copyright © 2000 - 2010, ADVIZOR Solutions, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This file (ReleaseNotes.htm) contains product information for ADVIZOR Analyst Edition 5.51 products. These release notes are available on the installation image as well as in the install directory for the product(s) you have installed.

Index

• New in this Release

• Platform Notes

• Installation Instructions

• Databases Supported

• Known Problems and Hints

• Technical Support

New in this Release

Features and Enhancements

• The 5.51 release of ADVIZOR Analyst Edition adds cross-culture compatibility to ADVIZOR projects. This means, for instance, that projects created in the U.S. locale can now be reliably opened in Italian or Brazilian locales, and vice versa. Older projects (for instance, created in Italian locale using ADVIZOR 5.32) would need to be opened and saved in the original (Italian) locale with ADVIZOR 5.51 before they could be opened in U.S. locale. (You may want to manually adjust the widths of columns in Data Sheet and Summary Sheet charts before saving.) Note that this compatibility does not extend to data in all character sets: for instance, a project created in Japanese locale with Kanji characters in field names would not display those characters correctly in charts in U.S. locale.

• A Flight Recorder is now available that tracks user actions. The Flight Record is a pane in Advizor Analyst (be default on the right side of the application). It is off by default, but can be displayed using the "View" menu. User actions are recorded to the Flight Record. The Flight Record may also be annotated with notes and images of charts may be captured to it, making it a place to make notes during an analysis session and record observations and results. The Flight Record may be printed, or items from it may be copy and pasted (or dragged) to other applications. See the User Guide ("Flight Recorder" in the index or in the "Using Views" section) for more details.

• The Counts chart has been modified in two ways. The default display for a field now includes a count of unselected rows in addition to the other counts. There is also a new property that may be used to define a custom layout for the chart, including only the statistics that you are interested in. See the User Guide ("Counts" in the index) for more details.

Existing projects using the Counts charts may need to be modified because the chart by default now does not include the "focus" line, making the chart layout different. You can also set the chart property "Selected only" to "true" to have only a count of selected rows.

• Summary Sheets may now have a statistic field that is the percent of that field that is currently selected for a category.

Defects

Approximately 50 defects have been repaired in this release. Notable changes are:

1. Heat Map charts no longer throw a Null Reference Exception when a category's total weight is 0.0 or when all data is excluded.

2. Editing a project in a way that changed the dependencies between items (e.g., a calculated expression that is used in a rollup table) often resulted in errors in the past when that project was re-loaded. Failures during loading are now handled by noting them and then going back to retry them after loading is complete. This will typically allow the project to be successfully loaded.

3. Aggregated tables with dates failed.

4. Projects with calculated expressions created in R5.3 or earlier sometimes were not read correctly by current software.

5. Division in an expression by a zero value caused the expression to fail, even if a test was made to avoid this division.

6. Expressions with missing values of different types could fail.

7. Heat Map title could not be changed.

8. Analytics models saved in project caused project reload to fail.

9. Data Sources in the "Manage Data Sources" dialog are now ordered.

10. Sorting of string fields in a Data Sheet was not done according to the current locale.

11. The "Overall" total line in a Summary Sheet is now always at the top of the chart; previously it could be sorted into the data lines.

Platform Notes

Client Requirements

Operating Systems

• Microsoft Windows XP SP1

• Microsoft Windows Vista 32 or 64

• Microsoft Windows 7 32 or 64

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP1 or Windows Server 2008. (See Installation Instructions below for a note on Windows Server 2008 considerations.)

Browser

• Microsoft Internet Explorer Internet Explorer 7 or 8. Internet Explorer 6 is no longer supported.

Other Software

• Features interfacing to Microsoft Office applications require Office 2000 or later. Output to formats specific to Microsoft Office 2007 is not currently supported, however.

Hardware

• Any current, business-focused PC or laptop.

  • This excludes computers with low-end, entry level processors.

• 2 GB of RAM or greater (See Note below). At least 2GB is required for larger volumes of data, about 750K rows.

• Graphics display processor with at least 256MB of video RAM

  • Either shared or dedicated video RAM is acceptable

  • Always use the most recently available drivers for the graphics display processor (contact the vendor to obtain them)

• Video display resolution of 1024 x 768 or greater

• Video display color depth of 16 million colors

• CD-ROM drive

• Mouse or compatible pointing device

NOTE: For a given dataset, performance of the ADVIZOR Analyst software is dependent on:

• Amount of RAM

• CPU

  • Processor speed

  • Processor architecture/technology

    • Amount of cache

    • Number of cores

in that order. Multiple cores are currently only used by ADVIZOR Server.

When deciding on a computer to use or buy, opt first for as much RAM as possible within economic constraints; however, once the amount of RAM has been decided, opt for the fastest and most powerful CPU that satisfies economic constraints.

The amount of RAM required is highly dependent on your application data. The minimum amount of RAM is determined primarily by:

• The amount and type of data being loaded into memory

  • The number of rows

  • The number of fields

  • The type of data in each field

    i. Alphanumeric (string) ii. Numeric or Date

• Your particular ADVIZOR Analyst application design

As a rough estimate of the amount of RAM required for your data, find the file size of each data file you intend to load when the data is in the form of a text file and sum the file sizes. Additional RAM will be required for your intended ADVIZOR Analyst application; however, in most cases the RAM required for data will be the most significant contributor. Beyond these general guidelines and within economic constraints, more RAM and faster processors will almost always maximize your ADVIZOR Analyst application's performance. Consider provisioning any PC or laptop with future expansion in mind.

Server Requirements

Operating Systems

• Windows Server 2003

• Microsoft Server 2008

Use of the 64 bit versions of server operating systems is strongly encouraged for increased memory support.

Other

• IIS 5.0, or newer, installed and running prior to installation of the Microsoft .NET Framework

Hardware

• Any current, server class computer, with multiple processor cores.

• At least 4GB of memory is preferred. On 64 bit servers, at least 8GB of RAM is recommended.

  • Each distinct project accessed by users requires its own memory space

    • RAM should be increased as the number of distinct projects accessed grows

  • Multiple users accessing the same project do so with minimal additional RAM overhead

• No graphics display processor is required

• Segmenting projects to additional servers must be considered as the user and project load grows.

We recommend that the ADVIZOR Server software run on its own server hardware.

Beyond these general guidelines and within economic constraints, more memory and more and faster processors will almost always maximize your ADVIZOR Server's performance. Consider provisioning any server hardware with future expansion in mind.

Installation Instructions

1. Prior to installing ADVIZOR Analyst/X, remove prior versions of ADVIZOR Analyst using Add/Remove Programs.

2. Insert the CDROM into your CD drive. Double click on Setup.exe in the root directory on the CD.

3. If you are instructed to remove a prior version of an ADVIZOR Analyst Edition product, proceed as directed, or use the operating system's "Add/Remove Software" facility.

4. If you are using the adv2advm tool, it requires these additional steps:

    cd/d c:\Program Files\ADVIZOR Solutions\Analyst
    for %i in (Vz*.dll) do @regsvr32 /s %i

5. On Windows Server 2008, security warnings are issued by the Operating System when the machine is in the default configuration because of Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration. These occur because a component version of the web browser is used by ADVIZOR Analyst. These warnings may be eliminated by disabling Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd883248(WS.10).aspx for more details. There is no security issue from the use of this web browser component because it never accesses any Internet web sites.

Databases Supported

• MS Excel (see note below)

• MS Access (see note below)

• SalesForce.com

• MS SQL Server (version 7.0 or later)

• Oracle (version 9i or later)

• ODBC interfaces to databases:

  • NOTE: ODBC DSN configurations must be defined as "System DSNs" through Windows prior to trying to use them in ADVIZOR.

  • Microsoft ODBC for Oracle - MSORCL32.DLL

  • SQL Server - SQLSRV32.DLL

  • Pervasive drivers

    • Pervasive ODBC Client Interface - W3ODBCCI.DLL

    • Pervasive ODBC Engine Interface - W3ODBCEI.DLL

  • MySQL driver

    • MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver - MYODBC3.DLL (MyODBC-3.51.11-2-win.msi - when used with MySQL version mysql-essential-4.1.13-win32.msi)

Note: For Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel and text files, you MUST use the non-ODBC options in the Data Wizard.

Known Problems and Hints

• See the special Install Instructions above if you are using adv2advm.

• Microsoft Office data formats (Excel, Access) can only be read with the 32 bit version of ADVIZOR.

• When using "Data Integration" on ADVIZOR Server, the tooltip on the data integration button in the published dashboard is created from the description that you provide when you publish. If you do not include a description, there will not be a tooltip.

• Do not publish using different versions of Analyst/X or Analyst and Server AE; use the same versions of each product.

• Some database products, like Microsoft SQL Server, may at times place significant demands on system resources. For this reason, we recommend installing ADVIZOR Server products on a machine other than the database server.

• Additional information (available on request)

  • Guide on advanced publishing

  • Guide on branding

  • Guide on audit logging

Technical Support

When submitting a problem to Technical Support, email is the preferred mechanism ([e-mail]). In the email, please provide as many of the following as possible:

• Your name & contact information including phone number

• The name of the product you are using and its version number

• Your license key used to install the product

• A detailed explanation of what you were doing that led up to the problem.

• Screen shot(s) and/or exact text of any error information

• Errors are logged to a file at:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\ADVIZOR Solutions\<product name>\error.log

Or, on Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\ADVIZOR Solutions\<product name>\error.log

Replace <product name> with Analyst or AnalystX, etc. as applicable to your product.

• Machine's System Information file created from the "System Information" saved as type ".nfo"

• Operating system's Application event log in .evt format so that we get the detailed event descriptions

• If you're having a database access problem, submit all relevant DB information, including DB vendor, DB version, whether the DB is local or remote, whether or not you are able to access the DB using vendor or third party supplied query tools, etc

If you encounter an error/exception and are offered the opportunity to forward diagnostic information, please do so. However, note that you can help reduce the time to resolution by also including details of the actions that led to the event. Our ability to rapidly understand the problem is significantly increased when we know all the details.

If you cannot find answers to your questions using the online help "Table of Contents", "Index" or "Find" tabs, or in this release notes file, have your application license number handy and contact us:

Call the ADVIZOR Solutions, Inc. Technical Support line during business hours (9:00 AM - 5:30 PM Central time, Monday - Friday) at +1.630.971.5280