Pyramid version 2020.23 is primarily a maintenance release addressing identified issues. However, it also delivers several new features. (Some of these are included as beta features).

New Semi-Additive Measures: First Child and Last Child in Model (beta)

Two new semi-additive measure aggregations have been added to the semantic modeling options. This means that while they may total for some dimensions, they may be aggregated in a different dimension. For example, consider a financial application. One of the Measures may be Cash Balance. If I consider the month of March, the value of Cash Balance will not be the total of Cash Balance added up for all the days in March, but it will be value of Cash Balance on the last day of March or the last day where there is data. In this instance Cash Balance would be declared as a “Last Child” aggregation, so that in a regular Hierarchy where Date was the child of Month, the value would be that last day where data existed, or the 31st of March. Similarly, the opening Cash Balance for March would be the value of Cash Balance for 1st of March, or the First Child.

Support for such semi additive Measures, coupled with extensive support for Parent / Child Hierarchies means very sophisticated financial analytic applications become possible and remarkably easy to implement with Pyramid.

Support for SAP BW Double Structures in BEx Queries (beta)

Structures are objects that can be defined in SAP BW BEx Query Designer. A structure forms the basic framework of the axes in a table (rows or columns). The setup of the structure determines the sequence and number of key figures or characteristic values in the columns and rows of the query.

Pyramid now supports the derivation of the set of measures created by the definition of these “Double Structures”, where one structure holds key figures (Measures) and the other the set of characteristics (Dimension Members). This makes all the calculated items immediately available to users without having to recreate them using Formulate. In many organizations, this may be hundreds or even thousands of calculated, derived values.

New Ribbon Tooltips

Users can access tooltips on all buttons in the ribbons by hovering the cursor over the button. Clicking on the Learn More link will open the more detailed online help pertinent to the topic. This enables users to immediately understand the functionality of each button, while optionally gaining a deeper understanding by viewing the topic in online help without having to search for it.

Model / Alert task cleaner

The admin can set the amount of time to keep data alerts and model processing logs. By running the task immediately, the task cleaner allows cleaning up of model and alert tasks with the ability to define how often the logs are deleted. This reduction of data assists in maintaining a more compact, responsive system.

New Page Size default

The default page size for printing can now be set per tenant. The administrator can define the default page size that will be used for all publications. The user won’t have to select it each time a new publication is created.

New Mobile Info button

Mobile users can access information relating to the content. By identifying content details like creation dates, source databases and content names, the user can engage meaningfully with content authors when requesting changes or clarification on content issues.

Chart Gallery

A new ribbon gallery showing different predefined chart styles allowing users to quickly switch the chart design. Users can choose from a selection of six different presets to apply to their charts and ensure a standardized look across all their charts in terms of the display of the Y-axis, legends, grid lines, data labels and report titles. This extends the same feature previously provided for grids and maps to most cartesian charts.

New Workday schedule option (beta)

Reports can now be scheduled to run on specific workdays of the month. The first workday of the month can be set to a Sunday or a Monday by tenant - to accommodate the different work weeks in different countries. This allows users to run a report on a specific workday of the month. For example, a schedule can be set to run on the third workday, allowing for month-end processes to be completed on the first two days before running the report.

Enable or Disable Auto-Discover

Users can enable or disable the Auto-Discover option in their profiles. This allows users to set a default for all Discover reports enabling them to only run reports when required. This is particularly useful for users running reports with long processing times where they only want to run the report after making all the changes.

New REST APIs for authentication and updating data model flows

The API now supports management of additional features related to the Model Flow. There are additional new features and improvements to Authentication APIs.