I just left an interesting meeting with SAP reps. One stated flatly that we would see better Webi perfomance if we translated our .unv universes into .unx format.
Does anyone have any experience that might support this statement? Or contradict it?
We’re on BI 4.0 SP4. Most of our universes where migrated in from a
previous 3.1 environment.
Tom Thompson 
(BOB member since 2003-06-04)
They would be unlikely to say the opposite.
Nick Daniels 
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)
I am not so sure about that.
UNX include quite some overhead and utilize the DSL Bridge (part of APS).
Going forward always use the new UNX (IDT), but I would be hesitant to convert my ture & tried UNV to UNX at this point.
Did “they” provide any more details why converted UNV universes would perform any better as UNX in Webi?
Andreas 
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
No details were given to support the assertion that unx was quicker than unv. I haven’t seen anything written from SAP that would indicate that, either.
I wasn’t born cynical, but I’ve talked with enough sales reps to take anything they say with a grain of salt.
So, I’d love to hear from anyone who has done a comparison. I may end up doing a controlled experiment on this.
Tom Thompson (BOB member since 2003-06-04)
I’d love to see an unbiased comparison…
However, I cannot stress enough that if you have existing UDT universes that are working, there is no reason to upgrade for the sake of upgrading.
There are a lot of ‘negatives’ about the new IDT tool which prevent me from even touching it at this point, the biggest of which is the sheer workload involved vs the reward.
Just from the sample unx’s I’ve played with, I’ve not seen any ‘huge’ difference… we’re probably talking microseconds in some situations, perhaps a second or two in the total WEBI decoding at best. Most of the heavy lifting in a WEBI document is done either at the database level, or the report server, and unless there’s something else going on with UNX files and the report server I cannot imagine any huge improvement.
That said, some of the features of UNX files do make it quite attractive to use for new universes , but unless SAP stops supporting universes tommorrow, I’m sticking with my UNVs for now.
JPetlev (BOB member since 2006-11-01)