Zipping/Compressing Cubes?

[KirkDudley]

Anyone know of a common compression tool that works well on cubes?
I need to send a couple of 200MB cubes to someone, and WinZip is only get 20% or so compression, even on the highest setting.
An old version of wise installmaker that I have compresses 40-45%, but creating an installation package is not appropriate in this circumstance.

 

[christenhusz]

After you define PowerCube properties and user classes, you are ready to create the PowerCube. You can create either a specific cube object or the cubes for all cube objects in the PowerCubes list. Also, depending on the number of categories in your cubes and the bandwidth of your network, you may want to compress your cubes or cube groups before you distribute them.

Because compression occurs after cube creation, you will not reduce the processing requirements, but distribution will be more efficient. Weigh the following advantages and disadvantages to determine if this optimization technique is worthwhile.

Advantages of Cube Compression

Compressed cubes are significantly smaller (typically 20 to 80 percent of their uncompressed size).

Compressed cubes automatically return to their uncompressed state when opened in PowerPlay.

You can incrementally update compressed cubes.

Options such as Partition Status, PowerCube Status, and Check Local PowerCube are still available.

Disadvantages of Cube Compression

Compression in Transformer, and decompression in PowerPlay, each take a few additional seconds.

Transformer must decompress a cube before updating it, and then compress it again.

Depending on your PowerPlay edition, topics in this section may not apply to you. For more information about the features of Transformer in the various PowerPlay editions, see the Features and Editions section in the Welcome chapter.

Steps

1. In the PowerCubes list, select the cube or cubes you want to create.

2. Open the property sheet for any cube that you want to compress, click the Store this PowerCube Compressed option (Processing tab), and click OK.

Note: You cannot compress multifile cubes.

3. From the Run menu, click Create Selected PowerCube or Create PowerCubes.

christenhusz