We also have the same issue. With multiple concurrent developers, it is very frustrating when someone unintentionally types incorrect formula and hangs up everyone in the development pipeline. I'm sure Anaplan has thought about it, but would love to see them come up with a realistic solution to this problem quickly (maybe add a "compile" button before deploying changes).
The roll back is major roadblock while fulfilling tight project deadlines and critical production bug fixes. Kindly prioritize on urgent and critical basis.
There are things you can do as a model builder to reduce the time of the model rollback
- Always think through your formula before submitting it. Ie. Check the format of the line item, type the formula in a text editor and then paste into Anaplan
- Always use a development model so end users don't experience the roll back of the model while making changes
- Follow model building best practices to make your model simplier which should decrease rollback time
- Anaplan professional services team can help provide a model review and model open analysis to detect what might be causing the long rollback - Reach out to your business partner to schedule this.
When your model gets so large or complicated that the model rollback time becomes a problem I have to agree with Frankie's views (above), in particular consider using ALM and start to do your development on a development model rather than a fully populated production.
It's not just about model size. Yes, our production model is 92GB (but that is still only 73% of the max workspace size of 130 GB).
In addition, we do have several development models that don't exceed beyond 50GB; and we do use ALM very robustly.
This rollback issue is more of an Anaplan problem. For e.g. if someone inadvertently puts a line-item format as Number instead of Text and applies CODE() function, the model would freeze for 4 minutes, compiling and ultimately giving a line item format error (for 5 full time developers, that means 5 * 4 = 20 minutes of wasted time on any given day). That is a serious issue.
Our current client is a big energy company, and we have budgeting and forecasting over the next 30 years.
To complete the requirement using only 65 GB we have created a lot of subsets, time ranges and we used all the best practices, but it was difficult working with multiple developers with this roll back. I understand the roll back makes sense when you create a formula with circular references, but it doesn't make sense a roll back because of a basic mistake, for example a wrong line item format.
Also, @Fwolf even using 50% of the workspace limit, we don't have space enought to have a development model to end users do not experience the roll back of the model while making changes.
We are currently developing a solution to help customers write the correct formula with the correct syntax, which should help to solve this issue that you're encountering.
I thought I would check on this while I'm waiting for the model to become from a recent rollback 😉 This means I actually have the time to post something as well...Are there any updates on this ? Other than the syntax checker, is there anything else that could be done to gradually improve on this area ?
eg Wrong format between source and target LIs causes obvious roll-back. I agree this could be very easily avoided from the developer, but can happen. Am I right in thinking this could be an easy check to introduce to bypass roll-back ?
Thanks!
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