What's new in Planning Analytics Engine

Planning Analytics Engine as a service

Planning Analytics Engine runs as a service and lets you manage all your Planning Analytics Engine databases through a single service endpoint.

High Availability (with failover)

When running as a service, Planning Analytics Engine can run individual databases in High Availability mode. When running in High Availability mode, the service manages multiple replicas of the database in parallel in a active-active set up. High Availability mode ensures that all changes are propagated to all replicas while dispatching requests to an appropriate replica to spread the load on the overall system.

When running in High Availability mode, one of the replicas is elected the leader. The leader effectively applies all the changes in a predictable order, after which all the other replicas apply the same changes, retaining the atomicity of the changes and guaranteeing a consistent view of the database at any given point in time.

The service actively manages the number of replicas of a database running at any given point in time. If one of the replicas becomes unavailable, the service it will make sure it gets restarted. If the leader happens to become unavailable, one of the followers is elected leader and assumes the leader role.

Horizontal scalability

Planning Analytics Engine allows the number of replicas of any given database to be increased or decreased without any downtime. This allows customers to scale up during peak periods and scale down during quite times without any interruption to users.

TurboIntegrator enhancements

In the Planning Analytics version 11 database, a TurboIntegrator process could execute another process asynchronously by using the RunProcess function. However, there was no coordination between the main process and the asynchronously launched process. The asynchronously launched process was unable to provide any feedback to the main process in terms of its execution status. To address this issue,Planning Analytics Engine introduces this set of new TurboIntegrator functions that facilitate communication between a main process and an asynchronously launched process.

• CancelJobs
• GetJobStatus
• WaitForAllJobs
• WaitForAnyJobs
• WaitForInternalJobs

Additionally, Planning Analytics Engine introduces several new functions to execute and manage HTTP requests.

• ExecuteHttpRequest
• HttpResponseGetBody
• HttpResponseGetHeader
• HttpResponseGetStatusCode

IBM Planning Analytics ODBC Data Connector for Planning Analytics Engine

The Planning Analytics ODBC Data Connector transforms local ODBC data sources to OData compliant REST API services that can be used by Planning Analytics Engine as the ODBC data source of a TurboIntegrator process. For more information, see Using the IBM Planning Analytics ODBC Data Connector