LS Insight (2020.2) Release Notes

About This Release

Released - February 19, 2020

This version of LS Insight supports versions 8.4 - 14.02 of LS Central.

Note:
If you have already set up LS Insight 2020.1, you can update to 2020.2 by following the update guidelines, but we recommend setting up the new versions from scratch.

In version 2020.2 we have added support for LS Central versions 14.0 -14.02, so now all on-premises versions up to version 14.2 are supported. We also increased member reporting and fixed an issue with incremental updates in the Data Warehouse update scripts.

The following is a list of changes and key features in LS Insight 2020.2.

New or Enhanced Features

Data Warehouse

Pipelines

LS Central Database Changes

Since Microsoft is dropping the Product Group table, LS Retail has introduced a new “Retail Product Group” table as a replacement in LS Central.

Because of this change all field mappings between the LS Insight and LS Central tables that include columns from these tables have been adjusted. All the Product Group Code fields in the LS Insight tables have been renamed to Retail Product Code and mapped to the same field in LS Central. The field length has also been adjusted to 20 characters. This impacts the following tables in the Azure database:

  • Stg.Item
  • Stg.MemberSalesEntry
  • Stg.Purchase
  • Stg.ReplenSalesHistAdj
  • Stg.RetailSalesBudgetEntry
  • Stg.TransSalesEntry

Here is a list of the exact table modifications between LS Central 13.0 and 14.2, where columns have been renamed or removed:

  • [Trans Sales Entry] - Column [Product Group Code] renamed as [Retail Product Code] from BC version 14.2
  • [Member Attribute Value] - Column [Cancel Date] removed from BC version 14.2
  • [Item] - Column [Product Group Code] not used but still exists and new column added [Retail Product Code] from BC version 14.2
  • [Retail Sales Budget Name] - Column [Revision] removed from BC version 14.2
  • [Retail Sales Budget Entry] - Column [Product Group Code] renamed as [Retail Product Code] from BC version 14.2
  • [Member Sales Entry] - Column [Product Group Code] renamed as [Retail Product Code] from BC version 14.2
  • [Purch_ Cr_ Memo Line] - Column [Product Group Code] not used but still exists and new column added [Retail Product Code] from BC version 14.2
  • [Replen_ Sales Hist_ Adj_] - Column [Product Group Code] renamed as [Retail Product Code] from BC version 14.2

Staging Pipelines

Chances to Pipelines caused by LS Central database changes between versions.

PL-stgTransSalesEntry

Version check by querying [INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[COLUMNS] and find if new or renamed column exists. If exist new SQL statement is made with same resulting dataset.

PL-stgMemberAttributes

[Cancel Date] is not used in the PowerBI reports and therefore a fixed value of NULL set for all versions - this can be removed later.

PL-stgItem

Version check by querying [INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[COLUMNS] and find if new or renamed column exists. If exist new SQL statement is made with same resulting dataset.

PL-stgRetailSalesBudgetName

[Revision] is not used in the PowerBI reports and therefore a fixed value of NULL set for all versions - this can be removed later.

PL-stgRetailSalesBudgetEntry

Version check by querying [INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[COLUMNS] and find if new or renamed column exists. If exist new SQL statement is made with same resulting dataset.

PL-stgMemberSalesEntry

Version check by querying [INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[COLUMNS] and find if new or renamed column exists. If exist new SQL statement is made with same resulting dataset.

PL-stgPurchase

Version check by querying [INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[COLUMNS] and find if new or renamed column exists. If exist new SQL statement is made with same resulting dataset.

PL-stgReplenSalesHistAdj

Version check by querying [INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[COLUMNS] and find if new or renamed column exists. If exist new SQL statement is made with same resulting dataset.

Reports

Two new hidden report pages have been added to the LS Insight Sales Power BI template:

  • Members that bought
  • Members that did not buy

Both of these report pages are hidden but can be drilled to from any item displayed in other reports, to a list of members that have bought and not bought the item.

.

Fixed Issues

Fixed incremental load of dimensions. We needed to rewrite all Stored Procedures that generate dimensions for the Data warehouse so that only new and changed items were loaded into the stored procedure.

fSalesPosted stored procedure now checks whether Primary key constraint exists before dropping it.

Hotfixes Released for This Version

Hotfix 2020.3.1

Released April 8, 2020

When we made the move from Azure Data Factory to Azure Data Factory v2 we neglected to move one of the Data warehouse pipelines to v2.

The missing pipline is called "fItemCostAdjustment" and is a SQL select statement to fill the table DW.fItemCostAdjustment using FULL LOAD as this captures the cost adjustments in the Value Entry staging table.

You can update your current LS Insight setup with this hotfix to fix the issue.