Category Archives: ep cookbook

Incremental Publish in EP

Just found an excellent option “Table-only Publish Post-GTP” that detects changes that make incremental publish incompatible and republishes application. It should be set to “Yes” by default, imho. See how incremental publish can streamline your reporting in these posts: 1, 2.

Event manager usage

I’d like to collect some scenarios of how Event Manager can leverage your Planning process, to recognize patterns later and be sure what to propose.It’s like a brain-storm, feel free to add your comments. And there it goes: 1 Automatic publishing of updated data – see here, and here2 Sending mail notifications of budgeting period [...]

Using @Time BiF to calculate allocations and access tables

I’m afraid that design post was too dense and somebody just missed this useful technique of managing time-related stuff.Using @Time you can get current date and therefore update allocation table importing fact data to include current month. Or lock the past quarter in application, since i’s budget is already accepted.See cognoise theme for an example.

More on real-time reporting on Contributor

Since I’ve got a couple of questions considering how to do it, I’ll get in more details on setting up Event Manager to detect application changes. See original post, and mind the second PS, especially. Some background: datadatetime column in nodestate table of application database is changed when user saves data, so we want to [...]

EP TimeScale Dimension

Just a rule to follow. Create time dimension so that detail item iids are consistent\meaningful and then add all summary items. So then in common Months dlist you’d get 1-12 for months, 13 for “1 Quater”, 14 for “2nd Quater” and so on. That will allow you to use simple time arithmetics in dlist formated [...]

That parallel-parallel Contibutor

Remember me muttering about array languages? Just in case, famous Jhost7.exe is a J language execution process. So every computation in Contributor is performed by array-processing J machine, packed to xml and held as a blob in nodestate table. So it’s APL in Analyst and J in Contributor. It’s really cool, because array processing is [...]

Some EP + BI tips

New Supportlink‘s article on EP+BI led me to my 2cents on EP + BI integration topic: Carefully select dimension for publish. – Its elements will become columns in published table, so if you want database only processing, you’d be able to preform complex calculations (mean, percentile, variance) only on those columns. By adding local processing [...]

Cognos Enterprise Planning Design principles

Usually these are the signs of coming disaster in an EP system: 1) too many dlists of the same “dimension”, some elements thrown out for cutting volumes, calculating or not calculating smth, and you have all seen them laying around just because they seemed to consistent at the time of creation. 2) manually maintained access [...]

Cognos “Real-time” Reporting on Contributor Data

8.2 makes many things nice&simple. To get a full budget report we need to do the following:    1) Publish the whole application    2) Run the report on published data Publishing a typical application of 100+ elist takes around 20 minutes, so no real-time here. But 8.2 introduces trickle publish, allowing to incrementally publish only changed [...]

Cognos EP 8.2 is out

Late as always (it’s out there since 16/07) I’d like to note that Cognos EP 8.2 is out. It’s really a major release with quite a number of new features, including: Transfer of annotations between applications by admin links(that was urgently needed for matrix agreement) Attachments in contributor — a possibility to attach a file [...]