There is a difference between modeling tools too. PowerCubes are modeled in Transformer, very stable, user friendly and mature OLAP modeling tool. It is very tightly integrated into Cognos 8 BI so it can use all the security settings and it can use Cognos 8 reports (form variety of sources) as data source. On the other hand the need to put together different types of data into one cube can be very challenging especially when you need to use alternative hierarchies or more than one time dimension. Moreover populating cubes requires lot of time and especially in final design phase can be very annoying.  It can also be difficult to find time space large enough to recreate cubes during night.

The TM1 modeling tool TurboIntegrator is a script generating tool rather than real visual modeling system. It is not very user friendly and requires sql coding for retrieving data from databases. You can use Cognos ReportStudio to create queries and then cut-paste it into TurboIntegrator but compared to Transformer it feels like in Stone Age. Also the look and feel of the tool is not very pleasant and sometimes it feels like a beta version. Anyway once you learn how to create customized cube loading scripts and few tricks how to avoid some traps you can become pretty productive. And the nice thing is that populating TM1 cubes is as much as 10 times faster than populating PowerCubes with the same data.

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