Category Archives: bi

Default Framework Manager package publish folder

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

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 [...]

Cognos 8.4 is finally out

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.

Cognos BI and MS SQL — not meant for each other?

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 [...]

More on choosing Dimension for Publish

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 [...]

Cognos FM: CVS problems

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 [...]

Speeding up Contributor publish

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

Admin Links from Package troubles

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 [...]

A simple enchancement for Cognos 8 BI

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’s pros and cons

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 [...]