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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In the old times, before SliceUpdate first appeared ) we’ve thought that one thing analyst lacked to be really all-in-one tool was ability to do loops. For, while, until — all that nice stuff. And when SliceUpdate was introduced it became clear that @Test(Restart) allows you to cycle macro execution on whatever basis. Using @Test(Restart) [...]
In 8.2 we’ve got incremental publishing, allowing us to create real-time reporting on contributor data and that sets up new frontier in model data transfer speed. Now the slowest part of models are administration links (who’d guessed that when 7.3 appeared). Here are some ideas of how to speed admin links up, using the same [...]
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 [...]