Cognos 8 BI Tuning Hard Drive Usage

August 5th, 2009

Just a quick hint and a reminder: there is a configuration option forcing Cognos to store temporary report results in memory rather than dropping them on disk. It’s especially usefull for DMR’s they are frequently cached on disk. Quote from Architecture and Deployment Guide. Depending on the size of reports and the amount of available [...]

Cognos 8 BI Dashboard Studio

March 31st, 2009

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, [...]

Cognos and MS SQL — happy together

March 19th, 2009

 Correcting myself. I was ranting about MS SQL and Cognos interaction. I was totally wrong. The problem, described shortly is: you have 2 databases in MS SQL residing on the same physical server you create a join “table A from db1 with table B from db2” Cognos creates two select queries (select * from db1.A) [...]

Default Framework Manager package publish folder

March 9th, 2009

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.

Back from winter-sleep

March 1st, 2009

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 [...]

Cognos BI and MS SQL — not meant for each other?

September 27th, 2008

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 [...]

More on choosing Dimension for Publish

July 5th, 2008

I already wrote some notes on choosing dimension for publish in this post. Today I just want to add some of points: 1 If you’re up to publishing some serious amount of data, variant with adding a dummy dlist with 1 item and using it as dimension for publish seems a very bad idea.  You’re [...]

Cognos FM: CVS problems

July 1st, 2008

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 [...]

Admin Links from Package troubles

June 3rd, 2008

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 [...]

A simple enchancement for Cognos 8 BI

May 5th, 2008

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 [...]

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