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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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 [...]
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 [...]
Sometimes it’s best to be late with fulfilling promises. Was I to write this post a month earlier, I wouldn’t be able to give people using Cognos BI with Microsoft Analysis Services and Oracle Essbase a life-saving advice. At least, the advice that I’d be really grateful a couple of years ago. A month [...]
A new TM1 resource just popped up on my radar. Take a close look at bedrocktm1.org. Overall approach excites coder part of me: modular development, agile, best practice source code — all this is actually very helpful. Having so much Turbo Integrator ‘how-to’s solves a lot of ‘re-inventing the bicycle’ cases. As far as I [...]
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Posted 05 August 2011
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If you’re a serious Cognos BI shop with Dev-Test-Prod migration and release management, you definitely have to read this Proven Practice article. Overall, proven practice articles are very good, I’ve skimmed through half a dozen of them. It seems that the easiest way to gain full article list is to filter by cognos_business_intelligence tag. This [...]
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Posted 25 July 2011
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