TimeXtender Desktop Q&A

Current advice on partitioning on a non-date field calls for creating a partitioning “bucket” using field transformations. While attempting to follow the instructions outlined here I encountered a problem. Partitioning works by creating a calculated field in the valid table that has the capacity to handle NULL values if the partition template is so configured. However, that same field, along with the calculated default value, is also present in the Raw table. This means that when anyone following TimeXtender’s guidance for non-date transformations executes the table, that execution will fail with the error “Cannot insert the value NULL into column ‘DW_PartitionKey’”Is this a bug, or does the documentation for creating partitions need to be updated? 

I have a number of Oracle data connections (TimeXtender Oracle Data Source) which have been set up and working against the same data source for a few months now. However, just recently, one of these data connections stopped working and started reporting timeout issues after 1 hour of connecting. I have multiple cloned versions of this same Oracle connection, and it seems to be only one of the cloned connections which is having this issue. I have since cloned one of the working connectors and added the 6 tables that are pulled by the failing connector (to mimic the failing connector setup) and this temporary connector runs without issue, completing in just a few minutes. As far as I can see, the 2 connectors are set up exactly the same way, its just the the original does not work whilst the new temporary test connection does. It may not be related, but this connector started failing one day after I had performed an in-place upgrade of both the TX ODX server and desktop client. However,

Hello, I added an execution package to my production instance. I want to add it to a certain job, but that job cannot find my package. In fact, it finds all packages except for the one I just added. How can this be?  

Hello,In Timextender there is a report called ODX Execution Log (see image). I was wondering in which tables the underlying data is stored.My company has a dashboard / chat bot that we use to check on our nightly DWH executions. For this we use the tables ExecutionPackageLogs, ExecutionPackageLogDetails, Projects, etc.I want to expand these reports with data regarding the ODX Transfer Tasks. I checked most of the tables in the metadata database (e.g. ScheduleJobs, ScheduleJobLogs) but I was not able to find it.  

HelloEvery day, I have a new Excel file in the Azure storage or OneDrive account. I use OneDrive to test phase. These file’s name change with a new day. How can I this multiple Excel files to one? Is there a option for Excel like aggregate files option in CSV?Best Regards

Good morning All,We are encountering the following:We have history tables that use the DW_SourceCode as part of the primary key. This is because we have multiple sources with the same structure which are merged together in one table after ODX. As primary keys can overlap in the different sources, we need the DW_SourceCode to make distinguish the data coming from one or other source. Also we need history as the sources have a tight cleanup system and we need to keep track of information ourselves. While developing some of the tables, the DW_SourceCode was somehow not included in the primary key in the first deployment and this was corrected afterwards. TimeXtender also reflects this: Although deployment was successful, the computed column definition of the surrogate hashkey was not altered: The problem we're having now is that the history is matched based on the surrogate hashkey. Now wrong records are updated (type 1 history) because the hashkey matches but actually shouldn't because t

One of my colleagues made a change to an incremental field on a very large table, not realizing that this would force a full load. We only realized what had happened halfway through our promotion, but since we needed to make changes to that table anyway, we proceeded. Reloading that table and its downstream tables took five days. Luckily, a long weekend greatly reduced the impact of that reload on our users. We have now begun our next promotion cycle.  Unfortunately, despite the fact that the table in question was reloaded in our development environment, differential deployment is again forcing a full reload of that table. We really can’t afford to spend a week reloading this table a second time. We’d love to know why the flag remains flipped in the first place, how we can avoid this happening in the future, and how we can avoid this extremely costly reload, as it is blocking our ability to promote urgently needed changes into production. 

TimeXtender beings almost all tasks by checking to see if the objects involved currently exist. It does this by querying SQL Server system views. However, this does not take into account a very unusual property of system views: querying them naively can result in SQL Server attempting to get a lock on the underlying system metadata tables. When it does this is wildly inconsistent - sometimes it will try to get a lock on the table when doing only a simple SELECT, other times it will only attempt to get a lock when certain joins are used. This isn’t really documented anywhere I’ve been able to find, but I have observed it in action many times. The problem is that SQL Server schema changes write to those metadata tables, which also locks them. And as long as the change is occurring, the tables stay locked.  This becomes an issue when rebuilding indexes. This is a very frequent occurrence curing TimeXtender execution as it happens whenever a table is fully reloaded. For large tables, this

We have a REST API that we use to connect to several endpoints. The default name of all the tables is: REST.Jsondata. This causes issues in our Azure Gen2 datalake. It gives an error saying the table name is already in use by a table with a different ID.I almost feel like there must be some really easy way to rename the table name before it lands in the Gen2 datalake but so far I haven’t been able to figure out how.The workaround I use now is to use a QueryTable but that is not the nicest way to do it I guess. 

Hello,My organisation recently had to redeploy our development virtual machine and reinstall timextender / odx on it. Since then I am not allowed to click on certain buttons inside the application, and options are missing when I right-click on certain objects.For example I am not allowed to click on the [Stop Task] button in the ODX Execution Queue window. And when I right-click on an object in the Manage ODX tab, all I can see it ‘View Properties’ and not any of the many other options that used to be there.I do have these functions available in our other environments. And my collegues have no issues on our dev machine.I have tried the following so far:Enable/disable Deprecated Features. Delete the hidden Default.rdp file and create a new rdp connection to the machine. Any tips?

Currently I’m using one ODX instance with this setup:  All the mapped data sources connections has selected the option “Enabled data on demand”:  I am using three instances of Data Warehouse: Development → Testing → Production.My question is:Can I create a new ODX instance connected to the same Storage container?The idea is that the same data sources in the DW instances for development and test use the "Enable data on demand" OFF option. In this way the storage container only will be refreshed one time (when we refresh the DWH production instance) because the data source is the same. 

Recently we identified that our Azure SQL Database Backup Costs for our TimeXtender environment are very high, almost even higher then the regular storage costs itself. We now try to minimize these Backup Costs. We already minimized the Backup Retention policies:Now, when analysing some Backup data in the Azure Portal we found that the Log Backup Storage Size is growing the the multiple TeraBytes, even though our PROD database uses around 28GB.  Does anybody know how we can further analyse and minimize these backup costs and data? I found the following regarding the transaction log, but I can't seem to dive in the transaction log/size per table or execution for example. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------In Azure SQL Database, transaction logs record changes made to the database to ensure data durability and provide for features like point-in-time restore and disaster recovery. Various operations within Az

Hello Guys. I tried to select table from ODX but it deosnt show none (except once query table).the transfer task work fine (it show succefull) but once I triy to select table in order to send them to the datawerhouse I show nothing.- even if it work fine when I use query tool. Any suggestion please? thanks@Thomas Lind   

I am loading a CSV (comma separated) file with the ODX. After upgrading the ODX to the latest version, transferring any table with this datasource gives the following error: Syncing does work.ODX version: 6521.1TX version: 6536.1CSV Provider version: tried both 22.0.8276.0 and 23.0.8749.0 but same error.

Hi,We have only source in which we are using a rest source and incrementally loading the data in the odx. The api cannot handle a date range that is too big. When we trying to preview the data in the odx, we see the data that we need. However, when we run the odx transfer task, with syncing it does not give all the updates in the table like it should. I saw that there were some fixes with the previous versions with incremental loading. We upgraded today to 6536.1. Also we upgraded the rest data source to the newest version. However, because the preview is fine, I don't think the problem is the source connector. 

I want to start an Execution Package at another server. I have attached the PS1 script. This script is working on the TimeXtender server. But not on our Qlik server. We use the same credentials. Also the credentials have access to the timextender.exe and the shares mentioned in the script on our Qlik server.I think the parameters package name and project name are not recognized when starting the script on an other server. Can you help me out to start an execution package on an other location then the timextender server? 

v20.10.35.64I’ve got a History table with ± 16 million rows in PROD and ± 2.3 million rows in TEST. To increase loading times I tried to delete some columns of the table, first in TEST. Here I was able to successfully Deploy & Execute the History table with Differential + Managed deployment, which finished in several minutes.However, when I try the same procedure in PROD it keeps stuck on the step Deploy Valid Table Structure as shown below. I also tried to Deploy with Differential Deployment unchecked, but with no result. It just keeps loading forever.Anybody an idea? 

I need some guidence saving contents ofan endpoint as BLOOB. I can see that the version we use doesnot have an option for BLOOB but may be Text or Binary with maximum length can give me what i need.So I have this RSD that i created <api:script xmlns:api="http://apiscript.com/ns?v1" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <!-- See Column Definitions to specify column behavior and use XPaths to extract column values from JSON. --> <api:info title="GetAllStops" desc="Generated schema file." xmlns:other="http://apiscript.com/ns?v1"> <!-- You can modify the name, type, and column size here. --> <attr name="kortnavn" xs:type="string" readonly="false" other:xPath="/json/kortnavn" /> <attr name="tittel" xs:type="string" readonly="false" other:xPath="/json/tittel" /> <attr name="virksomhet" xs:type="string" readonly="false" other:xPath="/jso

We are running TX version 6536.1.Our data source is AX Dynamics 2012 on premise. We have the issue both with the SQL Server connector and the OLEDB connector.After synchronizing, we can't select any tables with right click on the data source → Select Tables → Search.It also takes > 30 minutes before the table selector pops up.Our only option is to select all tables.The Transfer task - Select table option does give us the option to select tables. However we can't select any individual columns. Neither does this give us the option to define any incremental selection rules or row filters.

Hello, TimeXtender: 20.10.40.64ODX: 20.10.31We are using the ODX and TimeXtenders SQL database connector to get data from a synpase database. Sometimes the synpase databas seems to have problems, where a query runs and doesn’t complete (a seperate issue we are working on).However what happens in TimeXtender in the ODX is that the transfer task keeps running indefinitely and never times out, leading timextender execution package to run but just sits there waiting for the odx transfer task to finish. However nothing fails anywhere, so we do not get an alert.We need some way to be able to capture this.Is there anyway to set up one or both of these things in TimeXtender or if you have any other ideas?1. Kill the transfer task if it takes more then X minutes2. Get an alert on failure or long running taskThank you! 

Hi,We are setting up a new Azure environment for a client and we are having some issues with the Azure SQL DB.The app server VM is based on the one available in the Azure marketplace:https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/timextender.timextender-app-server?tab=OverviewThe issue occurs when we try to test the storage connection for the MDW instance. When we try to use Azure AD integrated or password authentication we get the error that adalsql.dll is not able to load when we test the connection in the desktop app.Azure AD integrated authenticationAzure AD password authenticationThe URL leads to a 404 not found: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=513072I found these two posts about AAD integrated auth, but it is not clear to me if it is possible or not to get it to work:I didn’t find any discussions about the Azure AD password authentication.Are these not supposed to work as authentication methods for a DW instance deployed in an Azure SQL DB? If they are, is t

Hi, We are running Timextender 6536.1 with execution server 6536.1 on on-premise sql server 2019.We seems to be having some strange behaviour with the “Manage schedule” option in with editing a job. Whenever we open the schedule it seems to trigger the job itself. I don't know if others experienced the same. I also don't know if it is related to Timextender 6536.1 since we had to do a lot of updates and configuration changes to the server lately due to a tempdb problem. Below I added a screenshot of the option, it applies to any job not only the odx one I'm highlighting.   

One of my clients has a file data source that arrives at unpredictable times of the day. Has anyone found a good way to external-trigger-load such data source when it arrives? E.g. Webhooks, Logic Apps, ...The question is for 20.10.43, but I’m equally interested in hearing if there are solutions for v6284.1 as we’ll be moving in that direction.Thanks!

Hi all,  I am relatively new to SQL. Although with help and searching, I am making progress, I am not succeeding with the following question. Based on a date, I can easily set a filter in my reports to look ahead for x period of time. However, when a holiday comes into view, my report becomes blank. For this, I am looking for an index/row_number/sequence that skips the holiday dates. Can I set up a Custom Field for this within my BaseCalendar?

At a customer, we are developing in a team of 2 on  TimeXtender 6536.1 .The Team development feature is switched on and, like in the 20.10.nn.mm  version, I would expect the refresh button to bring out any deployments that my colleague makes and vice versa.But this doesn’t happen so. Only by closing an instance and re-opening it, do the deployed modifcations appear.Are we the only ones experiencing this? Or are there others?We know that you can use workitems to show others what you’re working on, to avoid working on the same objects, but would expect a refresh to also show new items, if one depends on the  others work to proceed.