Designer release notes 2024

Our Designer development team works using quarterly releases. Scroll down to see the Designer quarterly releases from this year.

Note: Since the Q2 2023 release, all tiers of Apteco software now require a minimum of the .NET Framework 4.7.2 or later to be installed.

Note: Please see Notes for administrators for steps to be completed before applying a quarterly upgrade to your Apteco software.

Designer Q1 2024 software release

New features and improvements

Bulk Copy Program

FastStats Designer now supports a modern Bulk Copy Program (BCP) library. Added support for the Microsoft Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) Driver for SQL Server (versions 17 & 18). This update allows you to use current libraries for BCP extracts within Designer, removing requirement for the legacy SQL Server Native Client v11.

For more information, see the technical update on Bulk Copy Program (BCP) integration.

Extended capacity for table building in Enhanced Build Process

The Enhanced Build Process now supports building tables with up to 33 billion records, an extension from the previous limit of 4.1 billion records. This modification enables the Enhanced Data Builder to process larger structures, specifically for systems containing over 4.2 billion records. The FastStats System file format has been updated to accommodate this increased limit.

Note: Systems with tables exceeding 4.2 billion records are not backwards compatible with older versions of FastStats due to the file format change.

We’ve added support for additional join key types in the Enhanced Build Process, specifically GUID and Int64. Previously, only 32-bit integer keys and 80-byte text keys were supported for table joins. This inclusion of 64-bit integer keys and GUID keys enhances join efficiency, as joining these key types as text was inefficient.

Additional join key support in Enhanced Build Process

.dti file generation with Post-Load Action

We’ve added a Designer post-load action to facilitate the generation and deployment of the .dti file (an index file used for Distributed Processing). Previously, this file was generated on demand, leading to slow distributed query performance after a deployment. With this update, the index file is now generated as part of the build process, ensuring its availability immediately upon successful deployment of the system.

Increased processing efficiency

We’ve made the design XML loading and saving functions more efficient.

Bug fixes

Resolved an issue in the Enhanced Data Build process where the 'Zero' load statistic for Date & DateTimes wasn’t being populated correctly.
Resolved a slow start-up issue in Designer for core and linked systems. We’ve removed unnecessary retrieval of codes & descriptions from Core system during the system build, reducing delays.
Addressed an issue in Designer related to loading a variable of type 'Array'. The bug caused incorrect loading of records, specifically missing values due to trailing slashes. This fix ensures correct loading and data display in FastStats.
Resolved an issue in FastStats Designer where the Post-Load Action 'Run Script' didn’t support UTF-8 encoding for virtual variable scripts. Previously, adding UTF-8 encoded scripts corrupted the data as Designer assumed all scripts were in ANSI format. The fix includes auto-detection of encoding to ensure proper handling.
Fixed an issue in Designer causing an orphaned indicator on an excluded table to generate a SOURCETABLE build error. Previously, attempting to add an Orphan Indicator to an excluded table triggered a warning about a missing SOURCETABLE during the build process.