Applied dimensionality

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 [...]

As I’ve promised, here are naming conventions I tend to follow in EP projects. Setting up naming rules doesn’t seem so crucial at project start, but generally hits on you on the head on final phase, when development turns to support. And trying to support your colleagues model will leave you thinking about naming objects [...]

All thanks to Shawn Rogers for recording. Rob Ashe Interview Southwestern Energy Company CFO at the US Army’s Armament Research Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) Last “Cognos-only” forum, they say. Next will be more IBMish. And they didn’t invite me

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 [...]

Finally, we’ve solved problem stated in communities. And Robert allowed me to publish resulting library here as well. See attached zip file. Problem statement We have 2 cubes, one containing product groups sales (for example) and the other containing detailed product data. Users should be able to correct overall group totals and correct detailed product [...]

There are some situations when you definitely need some way of recognizing new input from user. These are rather rare occasions, but when it’s nice to have such a tool is sack. One of the applications was discussed in this communities topic. By the way, I’m spending much time on communities these days (it’s a [...]

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 [...]