BusinessObjects Board

Lumira 2.0 - opinions on suitability for release?

In March we upgraded from XI3.1 to BO4.2 and moved from a CPU license for Webi to CSBL BI Suite licenses.

On the advice from our vendor, we waited until Lumira 2.0 released before looking into Lumira/Designer - although I did familiarize myself with 1.31.x since about July.

However, I’m finding that pretty much every use case we’ve had for Lumira discovery so far has been stopped in its tracks by bugs and issues.

We have been using BO since 2000 (17 years) so are not unfamiliar with the product, and yet I have logged 3 times more bug and support calls since September for Lumira then we ever have for the rest of the platform.

I REALLY would like to make Lumira work for our organisation, but am becoming somewhat disheartened at seemingly fundamental issues.

Am I alone in this?

I notice that a lot of queries both here and on the SAP Q&A/blog go basically unanswered. Does this suggest the user base isn’t huge, or that there are lots of people struggling with it?

Or is it just me? I am trying to be positive about it, but daily issues when you think you’re making progress tend to grind you down.

I would be interested in any insights, good or bad around Lumira 2.0.

We’re on 2.0 SP02 Patch 1 currently, with BI Platform integration.


norty303 :uk: (BOB member since 2003-03-19)

I’ve found a lot more odd behaviour and issues in Lumira than the other more mature elements of our BIP system. We are still on BIP4.2 / Lumira 1.31.

This ranges from the annoying problems which seem to resolve themselves or appear inconsistently - like reports which when saved to the BIP which are blank when opened but fixed by importing and re-deploying, to more perplexing issues like the one I posted here last week Lumira - Inconsistent visualisations for non-admin users

It has potential to be a really nice product which supplements and builds on the more solid Business Objects base, but it does still feel like a Beta release in a lot of ways and I’m not confident in it producing good results.

On a side note I’d really like SAP to include some good examples. The ones they provide are pretty awful and don’t sell you on the end product.


DanDensley :uk: (BOB member since 2009-05-12)

Thanks Dan, glad to hear I’m not alone.
SAP Support told me this morning that Lumira 2.1 is due in about 2 weeks and they’re sending me the release notes.

I guess that will include fixes for issues I haven’t yet encountered, and hopefully some of my current issues will make the fix list quite quickly.

I demoed Lumira to a Director a few weeks ago to see if it had legs for any business needs, and it was very well received, with a further demo to a wider audience to be arranged.

However, I simply have no confidence in it currently, and deploying it to users isn’t possible with some of the basic stuff that is broken.


norty303 :uk: (BOB member since 2003-03-19)

I have a feeling the userbase isnt massive. Lumira 1.x didnt seem to have much uptake. I mean, if you weren`t using Lumira Server, just the desktop, for data vis, you might as well down load PowerBI!

Same with Lumira 2.0 really, I was on the Early Access release in August and have been frustrated with it ever since. Its as if the developers havnt seen any other visualisation products or think it`s 2011…

Basic things such as being able to convert a text currency field from a CSV to a proper number, the workflow is a pain. Just too many things for me to list. That is before I get to the worse pain of deploying SAP Lumira 2.0 for BIP. Try doing this in a 2 node scenario, it just doesn`t work out of the box. Then you get told by a SAP Guru “just install everything on every node”…!

/faceplam


ABILtd :uk: (BOB member since 2006-02-08)

That’s interesting. Our current issues are linked to when we added an extra node for resilience. If we turn one node off the problems go away, but that’s not really a solution and the support channels don’t really seem to know what’s wrong.


DanDensley :uk: (BOB member since 2009-05-12)

It seems logical to add a Lumira node due to Lumira being ‘in memory’ and the whole point is for users to analyse datasets in memory quickly. Hence you don`t want Lumira impinging on the rest of the platform.

Did you have the same paid as me setting it up? Or not got that far yet. It required editing various configs and installing the connection servers on the Lumira Node, apart from some firewall nightmares (its running in Azure so not SAPs fault there!!).


ABILtd :uk: (BOB member since 2006-02-08)

I agree on the user base. Google searches turn up very little content about topics, especially compared to Webi!

Corporately we have a small investment in Tableau, but as we have a long standing BI Platform installation, and many users that are comfortable with ‘Infoview’ it makes sense to try and slot something integrated in.

It’s just disappointing that it works as poorly as it does.
It’s as if they’re paying lip service to having a product in the space, but deep down know that they’re not really competing with the other options.

Ironically I received a user satisfaction survey about Lumira 2.0 this morning!


norty303 :uk: (BOB member since 2003-03-19)

Just by way of an update, Lumira 2.1 is released today and so far looks very positive.

At least 2 of our major issues seem to be fixed and from the recent ASUG slides it looks like some useful new functionality has made its way in, such as element linking.

Although I haven’t explored far yet, it seems to be more responsive and quicker, but I’ll be stress testing it in due course.

Just awaiting the BI Platform component to appear on the download site.


norty303 :uk: (BOB member since 2003-03-19)

Agreed, it seems quicker. Although I havn`t tried my 1.2 million row viz that Lumira 1 coped with, but Lumira 2 died with.

Element linking was vital to me, for user experience, so thats good. It actually saves justification settings in text fields now too…finally.


ABILtd :uk: (BOB member since 2006-02-08)

Yes there was definitely some pain in the initial set-up (That was 2 x BIP nodes, 1 x Lumira node in the cluster). That was working fine but the recent upgrade to 1.31.8 on the Lumira side and an additional Lumira node seems to have confused it. Lumira nodes have no CMS (connected to BIP CMS) and just have an AdaptiveJobServer and AdaptiveProcessingServer and LumiraServer servers.


DanDensley :uk: (BOB member since 2009-05-12)

An update on our situation. We are now on BIP4.1SP11 and Lumira2.1. The upgrade from BIP4.1SP7/Lumira1.3.8 was very problematic. 3 month+ support call with SAP and hotfix installation engine problematic. Just managed to get upgraded before the older version of Lumira finished support.

Installation is now up and running but has it’s own quirks and issues still. The upgrade to Lumira 2.X means we have had to add a ConnectionServer & ConnectionServer32 to the Lumira nodes and this caused confusion with Lumira Discovery documents trying to use the 32-bit one and failing because it needs the 64-bit one. The solution from SAP was to disable all the 32-bit ones … :hb: … though bizarrely and for no apparent reason it is working OK on BETA with them enabled.

(REF: https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2623312 )

Any Lumira 1.X documents you have deployed to BIP prior to upgrade simply “disappear” too. They are still there but need to be manually upgraded one by one, not a huge issue as we don’t have many yet, however SAP didn’t think it was important enough to:

a) mention this would happen during installation.
b) mention this in the upgrade documentation.
c) mention it anywhere outside of a blog post which turns up when you Google the issue.

I asked SAP directly in the ongoing upgrade support call why none of the Lumira documents were visible and was asked if I had manually redeployed the war files during the installation and to try that… :hb:

I had hoped Lumira was seeing proper development support from SAP as their counter to the likes of Tableau and Qlikview, I don’t see enough evidence of this now though. It feels more like a box ticking exercise to say “yes can we do that”. The key point about the competitors is not that they can do it, but that they do it well.


DanDensley :uk: (BOB member since 2009-05-12)