Archive for the 'bi' Category

BI system metadata impact analysis and what BI system APIs are for

May 19th, 2010

“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 [...]

Connecting BI system to Active Directory. Oracle BI vs IBM Cognos BI. Scripts to extract Active Directory information.

April 13th, 2010

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 [...]

Macro functions and prompts in Cognos BI reports

February 17th, 2010

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 [...]

Oracle BI Enterprise Edition vs Cognos BI

February 1st, 2010

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 [...]

Memory leaking in Cognos 8.3 BI

October 20th, 2009

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 [...]

Cognos 8 BI Tuning Hard Drive Usage

August 5th, 2009

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 [...]

Cognos 8 BI Dashboard Studio

March 31st, 2009

Finally got my hands to installing and trying it. Well, it looks nice, allows flash-based chart formating and turns Cognos portal pages into more dynamic “dashboards”. But it’s strangely slow (tried on a couple of computers) and all in all looks kinda “alpha” and plugged in at last moment. Installation is not that easy too, [...]

Cognos and MS SQL — happy together

March 19th, 2009

 Correcting myself. I was ranting about MS SQL and Cognos interaction. I was totally wrong. The problem, described shortly is: you have 2 databases in MS SQL residing on the same physical server you create a join “table A from db1 with table B from db2” Cognos creates two select queries (select * from db1.A) [...]

Default Framework Manager package publish folder

March 9th, 2009

Just a quick tip — this setting is stored in “lastPublishCM” property of fm.ini file Gave me some trouble recently, when language changes led to unappropriate publish folder name. Moreover, we were not able to publish anything at all ) Changing this file helped. Found via FileMonitor from sysinternals, as usual.

Back from winter-sleep

March 1st, 2009

Okay, it has been almost half-a-year (oh, dears) since the last decent post on this blog. Russian one has suffered as well, I must note. Reasons vary, but mostly it’s that I’ve been, you know, busy-busy. As I now start to reflect on it, it’s always a point of view thing and a question of [...]

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