LS Insight (2021.1) Release Notes

About This Release

Released - February 9, 2021

This version of LS Insight supports versions 8.4 and later of LS Central On-premises and later versions of LS Central In-cloud (SaaS). Setup of LS Insight for LS Central In-cloud (SaaS) needs some additional setup from the standard LS Insight onboarding process which is explained in detail in the onboarding documentation.

In this version staging pipelines have been drastically changed, so they are now completely dynamic for LS Central on-premises.

This change provided the opportunity to add support for multiple companies in the same LS Insight Data Warehouse.

A company dimension has been added to the Power BI template reports, but a report that compares two or more companies has not been created yet.

Because of these changes the LS Insight deployment script was modularized to make reuse easier of parameters on error. This also makes it easier to maintain and modify the deployment process and helps greatly during testing. The LSInsight PowerShell module was created for this.

Note: Since the changes in this version are extensive, this version should only be used for new installations.

The following is a list of changes and key features in LS Insight (2021.1).

New or Enhanced Features

Setup

Onboarding

The LS Insight deployment script now uses the LS Insight PowerShell module to set up LS Insight.

This changes the maintenance of the deployment process drastically.

Product Package

The product package now contains a folder with the following files:

  • arm_template folder
    • arm_template - LS Insight.json
    • arm_template_parameters.json
  • Modules folder
    • LSInsight folder
    • LSInsightUtilities folder
  • DeploymentScript.ps1
  • LS Insight Hotels.pbit
  • LS Insight Inventory.pbit
  • LS Insight Sales.pbit
  • Scheduler Job Header.json
  • Scheduler Job Header_Hotels.json

New additions include the Modules folder and the Scheduler jobs for the Hotels extension. Version information has also been removed from Power BI report template files, the version is still visible when the template is opened and saved as report.

Because of the new PowerShell modules, the DeploymentScript.ps1 file is notably shorter than in previous versions.

Data warehouse

Database

Tables

A drastic cleanup has been done in the template LS Insight Data Warehouse database.

Because of the dynamic staging pipeline changes, the staging tables are no longer present in the database template, but are generated dynamically from the meta data gathered from the LS Central database.

This also means that all data manipulation for the DW was moved from the staging table loading scripts to the stored procedures for the dimensions and facts.

Each LS Insight staging table now combines the Business Central (BC) base table with all extension tables with the same name, or if the table only exists as an extension table then that is the only data loaded to the staging table.

Additionally, we now check if you have asked to include more than one company in the LS Insight DW and load data from all companies into the same staging table, thereby adding a new company dimension to our Data Warehouse.

Meta data tables

A few tables were added to keep track of the meta data needed for the staging process to work dynamically and they are all prefixed with LSInsight$:

  • LSInsight$Companies
  • LSInsight$LSCentralColumnMetadata
  • LSInsight$QUERY BASE
  • LSInsight$SourceTables

How these tables are used with the new pipelines is explained in this overview of the new Azure Data Factory.

Staging table syntax

The syntax for the staging table names has changed from Stg.Item to Stg$Item.

Stored procedures

Because of the change in the staging tables, the business logic that was in the old staging scripts had to be moved to the stored procedures for the dimensions and facts.

Every single store procedure in the DW template database was checked to make sure that the same manipulation and combining of data was applied as before and that the company dimension was added to all dimension and fact tables, so data would not get mixed up between companies. The structure and syntax of the procedures was also synchronized to increase their maintainability.

In addition to internal cleanup, several dimensions that were not in use were also removed. If you try this setup of LS Insight and are missing something from a previous setup, please submit a support request through the LS Retail Portal (login required).

Pipelines

In version 2021.1, LS Central database meta data are utilized to generate and select queries for the staging tables in the LS Insight DW. A single pipeline in Azure Data Factory is then used for the extraction and load process.

In previous versions there was one pipeline in the ADF for each staging table. Adding source tables and companies demanded creating additional pipelines. In this version, adding tables and companies is now meta data driven.

A new overview page of the new ADF was created, explaining the changes made from the older versions of LS Insight. The onboarding process has been updated to include the changes made to the pipelines.

Reports

LS Insight Sales

Changes to the LS Insight Sales report:

  • Version was removed from report template name.
  • Company dimension was added to report.
  • Time dimension in report is now set to one hour.
  • Transaction numbers have been removed from fact sales posted.
  • Journal document dimension has been removed from factSalesPosted as it was taking up a lot of space and not utilized in the report.

LS Insight Inventory

Changes to the LS Insight Inventory report:

  • Company dimension was added to report.

LS Insight Hotels

Changes to the LS Insight Hotels report:

  • Company dimension was added to report.