Category Archives: cognos

Cognos PowerPlay Transformer Limitations

Just a bullet list of things that separate Cognos Transformer from being a capable OLAP-tool in modern market. Neither of these problems will be solved, I think, and this will lead to Transfomer’s death in near future (about 5 years, imho, given huge userbase). That’s a pity, since it’s a nice tool, absolutely brilliant 10 [...]

Cognos Powerplay zero suppression

Extracting from a discussion from sql.ru forum: PowerPlay performs very bad when it comes to large and sparse (with big number of nulls and zeros) cross-tabs. Modern OLAP engines are specially optimized forNonEmpty MDX clause, which is default report generation option. PowerPlay was designed for fast cross-tab rendering and maximum amount of calculations on client machine. Nobody [...]

Cognos BI temporary files (UDA)

Just a link to developerWorks thread where Phil_W gives an excellent explanation. Note this guy, all his post are truly brilliant: concise, informative and insightful. I use ProcessExplorer to find PIDs too. And all the rules for Oracle BI temp files stay in place — I\O speed is crucial, use SSD )

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

“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 hint – TurboIntegrator Local Variables

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 [...]

Multidimensional reporting functions in Cognos and Oracle

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 [...]

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

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

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

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

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 [...]