Cognos 8 BI Dashboard Studio

Finally got my hands to installing and trying it.
Well, it looks nice, allows flash-based chart formating and turns Cognos portal pages into more dynamic "dashboards".

But it's strangely slow (tried on a couple of computers) and all in all looks kinda "alpha" and plugged in at last moment. Installation is not that easy too, it requires war building and deployement, procedures that not every BI consultant is aware off.

So I think we should wait for another couple of service packs and there'll be a new standard tool for portal page development. XCelcious should be afraid )

Posted on 31st March 2009 in bi, cognos | No Comments »

Cognos and MS SQL — happy together

 Correcting myself. I was ranting about MS SQL and Cognos interaction. I was totally wrong.

The problem, described shortly is:

  1. you have 2 databases in MS SQL residing on the same physical server

  2. you create a join “table A from db1 with table B from db2”

  3. Cognos creates two select queries (select * from db1.A) and (select * from db2.B) and then does join locally on server. That’s terribly slow. Cognos should be generating one select query, performing the join on the db server and that’d be really fast.

The answer is simple: there’s no way Cognos can find out that these two databases are on the same physical server. But we can help old fella a bit, setting a datasource property (Content Manager Datasource) the same for both datasources. Therefore, the same datasource prefix will be generated for both tables and they’ll be regarded as residing on the same server. Query speed will increase dramatically.

Morale:  always set the datasource property for MS SQL databases located on the same server. 

Posted on 19th March 2009 in bi, cognos, tips | No Comments »

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.

Posted on 9th March 2009 in bi, cognos, tips | 8 Comments »

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 self-control and ability to say no )

But enough philosphy, brief recap on what happend while I was out "there" in real world. I'll divide this into two parts (by vendors ))

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted on 1st March 2009 in BI&CPM, bi, blogging, cognos, ep, hyperion, ibm, oracle | 2 Comments »

Cognos EP Cut-down models

Just a quick tip: read this cognoise thread thoroughly -- really in-depth discussion.

Posted on 27th January 2009 in cognos, ep | No Comments »

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.

Posted on 27th November 2008 in bi, cognos, ep | 2 Comments »

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 you can either:
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted on 27th September 2008 in bi, cognos | 1 Comment »

Essbase book

Read Edward Roske and Tracy McMullen's "Look Smarter than you are with Essbase System 9" over the weekend. It's really the best "technical" book I've read over past couple of years. Written in simple and not annoying language, with a lot of humor (I couldn't hold myself when I've read the fight club joke) -- definitely a must-have book for any essbaser out there. Found really helpful, although I knew most of the points already. But, oh my, appendixes rock -- calculator cache explained is a real gift.

And, more important, this book really gives you an overall picture and shows a way to go. DBAG covers every topic with excessive amount of details so you can't see the forest over the trees.

Kudos to Edward and Tracy, it's a fantastic job. I'm waiting for ASO one.

PS: Too bad it wasn't there a year ago. And too bad there are no such books on cognos
PPS: Edward has a blog, as you all know.

Posted on 16th September 2008 in oracle | No Comments »

A couple of small, but oh-so vital Cognos Enterprise Planning Enchancements

Why am I writing this?

Well, sometime it helped and we now have allocation tables in administration links. Although I'm sure my post didn't have any impact, some deem hope remains

I'm going to repost this into Communities and into Insight. And, maybe, we can create some noise by voting for these enchancements in Insight aka registering those enchancements again (they get piled up together, as I've found out).

Some those two echs are:

1) Easy as: "Add the ability to import Calculation Options and Weighting while importing a dlist"

If you've ever done some external dimension management, you know that:

- you have to use unique names to keep dlist IID the same when names (but not unique codes) of items change

- you can import formulas as calculation text, just put item names in curly brackets )

- if you use Update\Remove obsolete it always deletes all Calc Options and Weighting from dlist. That means that you cannot update any cacluation dimensions, such as Accounts. 

So you manage all simlple dimensions by updating them (with Remove Obsolete selected) and unique names, and you manage all dimensions with weighting by manually changing them. 

Shouldn't be like that.

2) Even simpler: Add a Contributor macro for importing translations

It seems weird to have a single table with translations for Cognos BI and then to manually (or semi-automatically by text import) copy it into Contirbutor application. Shouldn't be hard, ability to import translation text is already there, just need a macro step

3) And another one (maybe no one will notice): Import deployment packages as a macro step too  

Automating dev-prod. backup-restore -- all those things that should be automagical

 

So, if these things annoy you as well -- drop me a line, and I'll send you Cognos Insight ench numbers to vote for.

Posted on 11th September 2008 in analyst, cognos, ep | 1 Comment »

Essbase first impressions

Finally got a chance to try essbase out on real data volumes. Building half-a-billion facts cube turned out into something like this:

PS: I have very special attitude to David Lynch's films. A physical one. Just the sight of road running away at "Lost Highway" makes me creepy. It takes me about 5 seconds to identify Lynch's work, as I've found out while watching "Chacun son cinema". Might be camera angle...

Posted on 30th August 2008 in oracle | No Comments »

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