I was decribing the 4-year old trick of using Cognos server cluster to build powercubes and got a new idea. Really, PowerPlay cubes building via scripts is a so 1990s, 21st century is for enterprise scale, failover, monitoring and you-know-the-pitch. If we make Transformer cube build a Report/Job in Cognos Connection, we get: load-balanced cluster [...]
I’m playing around with some TM1 ideas and all of them require some sort of sparsity analysis. And since TM1 supports MDX (to some extent, to say it mildly) and I like MDX and used it a lot with Essbase, I thought it’d be wonderful to use MDX. And any post is better with a cat [...]
Ever found yourself wondering what users are really there in your BI Consumers or any other group? Sure, you’ve got a few of them explicitly listed there (bad practice) but mostly you’ve got just a list of other groups like “Western Division”, “Marketing” and all those (good practice). And they’re, most likely, nested into each [...]
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Posted 22 January 2012
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bi § cognos
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I’ve recently completed my first real DataStage project and took a chance to get certified while all the stuff is still “fresh”. Certification itself is quite complex and I didn’t use most of the tricks depicted in questions up until the moment when one of the jobs had to process a quarter billion of rows [...]
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Posted 17 December 2011
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etl
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I must be the last one to notice, but you can actually try out Cognos 10.1 BI and Cognos Express for free (time limited trial). That’s very convenient and is totally a major shift from usual ‘we have products soooo good that you have to ask partners to show them’ policy. ‘Open download and use [...]
This’ll be a bit long (but with a hidden bonus for attentive reader), so I’ll start from conclusions. If you’re using a recent server with Intel CPUs, you’d better check whether they have Hyper-Threading (HT) and try turning it off to gain 2x speed boost. How to do it: 1) go to server, open command [...]
Seems like I can rename this blog ‘Reminisces’ any day now. After some years of not prodding into Cognos EP I was asked to look at a rather confusing error. Export deployment wouldn’t work, throwing ‘null’ error initialising object selection dialogue. Yes, as these two IBM support articles (1,2) state: it’s a problem with duplicated objects [...]
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Posted 08 November 2011
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ep
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Big news: we’ve relocated to Sydney, Australia (yep, the one with the Opera house, kangaroos and Fosters). And as of 1st of November I’ll be joining small, but proud ”bunch of guys that share the same passion and dedication for Cognos (and sometimes the same sick humour :))” ©, namely, PMSquare. There’ll be more upside-down stories here, I promise. As [...]
After, oh my god, 4 years, I’ve spent a couple of days typing Cognos 10 SDK Java code. What changed in BI automating during this period? Well, the biggest change was trivial: I’ve forgot everything But that turned out to be good news, since version 8.3 to version 10 changes are huge. I remember reading SDK [...]
Just a quick Cognos BI hint: you can use session variables to store project-level constant values. I’m a big fan of ‘feature-rich’ ETL reports showing not only what dimension element mismatch between systems, but also allowing seamless editing of element mapping. This usually means drilling down from report into external application for dimension mapping. Parameters [...]
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Posted 22 August 2011
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bi § etl § ibm
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