Models as general mechanism to manage and backup individual Jedox solutions

With the "models" mechanism Jedox already has an effective way to package, backup, transfer and organize complex Jedox solutions.

However, so far this valuable asset is only used to distribute content from the app store, demos, training material etc.

Without major technical changes it could however be used by anybody to manage Jedox solutions and the whole "landscape" of solutions on a Jedox instance.

This would require nothing but assigning "model developer" rights to the admin user in Jedox for everybody, enabling them to create, export and reimport models on their own.

You could then

• divide the Jedox solution landscape in any instance into different models — without this complexity becomes overwhelming very fast when you have multiple solutions – especially in the integrator, where there is no other possibility of segmentation, like folders, groups etc.

• backup the solutions easily by exporting one or more models as whole – with or without databases packaged in scripts — without this one needs to export a large number of individual items, again especially in the integrator, unless you use hopelessly complex projects (I prefer small modules chained together by external jobs).

• reimport models selectively, into the global namespace or into another namespace for testing and development.

• transfer models to and from testing environment securely and without errors.

• manage and archive versions by archiving exported models – they already have a system with version numbers etc. in place.

These capabilities would be valuable for everyone, without them Jedox is lacking essential features to manage a sustainable environment.

I can see no harm that anybody could do with this tool with negative impact for Jedox, not even in connection with commercial models, as they are protected, as far as I know.

But I can see a lot of good things and a huge quality improvement in individual Jedox solutions in general that would come from this.

ABOUT BACKUP:

You could also integrate this into a general auto-backup mechanism by automatically exporting all the models and all the databases as jdxp-packages and zip-files that you can then upload selectively via the front-end, even as duplicates, to then see what needs to be recovered.

The current backup in the cloud console is only good if you have to reset the full solution. Otherwise it is hard to extract individual items from this, e.g. ETL projects from xml files within the config database – I've done it, it worked, and the client was impressed, but that's not a proper way to do it, and the client could never do this without help.

Resetting the full solution is also not the most common scenario where you need backups. It is far more common when something got lost or corrupted by human error, be it data, dimensions, reports or integrator projects and you need to restore some elements while keeping others that have changed in the meantime and are still valid an required. In this case you need to restore a copy of selected parts of the solution and extract, copy and transfer items from there.

You can easily do this with model-base backups through the front-end. It is extremely hard and dirty with the contents of the zip-backup.

Thorsten Geisinger