Cognos “Real-time” Reporting on Contributor Data

August 21st, 2007

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 data.  This greatly shortens time spent on publishing.

The question now is how to find out that it's time to run incremental publish.  

By pointing Event Manager on nodestate table we can detect any event (save, submit) happening in application. And using Event Manager ability to detect change in specific column (changetimeid for example) we can fire an event each time somebody saves data. This event triggers incremental publish and there you go.
    1) Somebody saves data in contrbutor
    2) Event Manager raises an event, since nodestate table changed
    3) Event triggers a Contributor Macro running incremental publish
    4) Refreshing a report brings out new data
Since only 1 elist is published at a time, speed is astonishing (around 15s in our case).
Maximum lag between entering data and seeing it in report depends on Event Manager request period (minimum 1 min), so in 2 minutes  max people see entered data in reports.

PS. Event manager requires some condition to start an event and doesn't accept simple "true", "forall" or  something, so we write "1=1" conditions )
PSPS. Disallow cache for appropriate reports to avoid reading old data. Set datasource processing to database only and turn off report cache in query attributes.

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6 Comments »

 
Comment by C UNITED KINGDOM
2008-01-19 03:56:57

Hi!

I have a question around the “table” format for publishes. Is it possible to get an Incremental Publish from CP 8.2 in “View” format. For some reason, the “Table” format publish doesn’t have the standard 5 columns – but also includes columns for every GL code I have – so this could be up to 800. And if I change/add/remove a GL code, then the columns change. This makes it hard froma Data Mart point of view, as I want to have a stable table structure.

Can I configure the Full and Incremental Publish to be in “View” format?

Thanks in advance.

C

 
Comment by ykud RUSSIAN FEDERATION
2008-01-19 23:20:35

Hi, C.
You have to choose a dimension for publish in table layout to work, and it will be transposed to columns. If you do not choose anything, your calculation dlist is used as dimension for publish and that’s why your GL is transposed right now.

A common workaround is to add another dlist containing 1 element to cube and use it as a dimension for publish.

See this post as well http://ykud.com/blog/?p=182

And note that using dimension for publish you can decrease number of rows in table and therefore increase query execution speed.

 
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