Applied dimensionality

Go check the download page. One wonders, what’s that 64-bit BI server is all about — they’ve really pushed the report server further, or that’s just compatability release.

We’ve encountered an annoying Cognos 8 bug recently.  Usual scenario if you’re creating reports over Enterprise Planning data includes “unioning” data from several applications.  For example, you have an Operating Expenditures planning application and a Sales Planning application. To make a simple P&L, you just have to show up data from both these applications. So [...]

I already wrote some notes on choosing dimension for publish in this post. Today I just want to add some of points: 1 If you’re up to publishing some serious amount of data, variant with adding a dummy dlist with 1 item and using it as dimension for publish seems a very bad idea.  You’re [...]

If you’re using CVS for your Cognos Framework manager models (and I recommend to do that, it’s essential as multi-developer and backup_to_point tool), you can encounter the problem I’ve met today. Something went wrong during checkout on one machine and model became marked as “checked out” prohibiting further changes. With no way to toggle undo [...]

2 excellent Proven Practices documents were published today, describing how to speed up publising (cognos.com login is required): – using oracle – using ms sql server Same old “If you are loading data, drop indexes” roams

A lot of work stops me from investigating it further, but I’ve experienced some errors in admin links (dlinks) from cognos package when data contained double qoutes (“). I guess, this is due to the fact that package links generate an xml mapping file (source to destination) which contains lines like and this file is [...]

I just thought that it’d be nice to have a built-in url shortener (like tinyurl or is.gd) for Cognos Reports. It’s not always possible to apply html tags while sending a report link to a colleague, so such a simple thing would help me a lot. Such an url shortener can be added as an [...]

DMR stands for Dimensionally Modelled Relational, a Cognos modelling technique allowing to present relational data sources as OLAP cubes (this meaning adding notion of dimensions with hierarchies and measures with various aggregation rules). All OLAP-style queries, roll-ups\drill-downs are then transformed into appropriate sql (group by’s, aggregations) by Cognos Server. It’s not a Cognos-only idea, see [...]

One more DIY article. This time we’ll talk about… You have more than a dozen Power Cubes (20?50?100?)? And since you can use only 2 CPUs per cube on Windows platform and “update-windows” are only narrowing, you have a couple servers (3?5?)? And so you get the task of carefully splitting cube creation tasks on [...]

Scrapped it out from my answer on cognos communities, maybe it’ll help someone. Drill-through is really to tough to debug. Prior to 8.3 I’ve used following routine: 1) Set the target report filter to optional 2) Add 2 new text item to target report, and change them to ReportExpressions of ParamDisplayValue (?param?) and ParamValue(?param?) This [...]