Applied dimensionality

“Okay, this column in our BI metadata was supposed to be named Sales, not Sals. But when we change it, what will happen to the reports that were created, using this name? And how many reports use this column anyway? Maybe we shouldn’t touch anything to keep things working…” Ever been in such situation? This [...]

TM1 TurboIntegrator (TI) is truly a highly customizable tool I recently needed to be able to pass cube view names as a parameter for export process and it turned out to be really easy. Although DataSource is selected via menu during TI process creation and there are no TI functions to change it, it can [...]

As many of you already know I have a mixed attitude to Cognos BI DMRs (dimensionally modeled relational source) models: performance is allways a consideration, full-table scans are unpredictable there’s always ‘local processing’ vs ‘database only and some things not working’ dilemma using multidimensional functions in reports is oh-so-hard to debug when they don’t work in [...]

I consider Single Sign-On setup through Active Directory(AD) a key point in every system’s life. Up to this point — it’s just a PoC, a prototype or a department (10-20 users) level application. AD integration step is usually prosponed, because it’s documented somewhere and there are much more important things to do, like showing that [...]

This post spent a year in drafts -( But Macro functions are an interesting feature of Cognos BI and sometimes their usage is unavoidable. You can use macro functions in Report Studio to do some manipulations with prompt values before they are used for actual processing in filters, report functions, etc. As a general (and [...]

Since I’ve spent some time working with Oracle Business Intelligence last year, I think I’d write a simple comparison list of strengths\weaknesess of OraBI EE vs Cognos (see post on the same topic by Venkatakrishnan). All of this is imho, of course. Oracle BI EE Pro’s: 1) Aggregate navigation — ability to set up aggregate [...]

You know why i’ve started this blog in the first place? To get advice, of course. And today DesiCresnet shared a wonderfull piece of information concerning memory troubles in BI 8.3. Those who aren’t struck by occasional CAM-AAA-0071 “An internal error occurred” which stops the whole server can skip this post. This error was discussed [...]

Tip of the day: Having common metadata layer for BI and Enterprise Planning is really cool, especially with the ability to load data from BI packages to EP via links. Just that it sometimes doesn’t work. But there are always some workarounds. With mostly very cryptical error messages or without any. One of the problems [...]

Just a quick hint and a reminder: there is a configuration option forcing Cognos to store temporary report results in memory rather than dropping them on disk. It’s especially usefull for DMR’s they are frequently cached on disk. Quote from Architecture and Deployment Guide. Depending on the size of reports and the amount of available [...]

This post will be some extracts from a recent PoC, where we made a complex planning system including a rich scenario modeling part. So it was our first big TM1 + EP integration experience. Some basic definitions: Cognos Enterprise Planning (aka Adaytum EP) is a very scalable system, all computing is client-side, nice workflow organization, [...]