Tag Archives: bi

Admin Links from Package troubles

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

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 [...]

Using Oracle Model clause in real-life )

I’ve been a long-term fan of oracle model by clause, talking about here and there, doing some small&funny examples (like eight queens solution in one select) but lacked some real-life necessity to use it. It always turned out that partition by was enough, or some tricky analytical function was already built-in (like trend calculations I [...]

DMR’s pros and cons

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 [...]

Future Oracle BI Architecture by Rittman

Just in case you missed that — awesome course about on how to cook Oracle BI projects is freely available!!!

Creating a Transformer task-balancing cluster, using Cognos 8 balancer

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 [...]

Debuging Drill-Through

Scrapped it out from my answer on cognos communities, maybe it’ll help someone. Drill-through is really to tough to debug. Prior to 8.3 I’ve used following routine: 1) Set the target report filter to optional 2) Add 2 new text item to target report, and change them to ReportExpressions of ParamDisplayValue (?param?) and ParamValue(?param?) This [...]

Ways of calculating Running Count to import data into Multi-Line models

I’ve nicked the term “Multi-Line” model out from some cognos best practices presentations. Never known it was called that way ) Multi-Line is only way to go when you have a potentially huge dimension only a tiny bit of which should be available to end-user at a time. Like employee planning, whole dimension of 10k [...]

Calculating trend lines in Cognos Report Studio and Oracle SQL

I’m more than just emotional right now since I’ve finally got that bugger of my neck. To those who’re interested in getting trend calculated in oracle — press page-down once. Trend line calculation in Cognos. It’s 2008 as my desktop calendar says and it’s “Targeted information to a broader range of users ” on top [...]

Contributor Audit Reports

A common question of ep admins is: “How can I see all users currently logged into planning wrt applications they’re using?” Something like: “Steve is now editing Capex and Sales Planning, and Mary is the only one in HR application now”. The task relatively simple for 1 application (yet required view publish for version prior [...]