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I was decribing the 4-year old trick of using Cognos server cluster to build powercubes and got a new idea. Really, PowerPlay cubes building via scripts is a so 1990s, 21st century is for enterprise scale, failover, monitoring and you-know-the-pitch. |
Recent posts
Cognos Transformer multi-server cube building revisited
TM1 MDX querying snippet
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I’m playing around with some TM1 ideas and all of them require some sort of sparsity analysis. And since TM1 supports MDX (to some extent, to say it mildly) and I like MDX and used it a lot with Essbase, I thought it’d be wonderful to use MDX. |
Cognos Content Store Security Overview in SQL
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Ever found yourself wondering what users are really there in your BI Consumers or any other group? Sure, you’ve got a few of them explicitly listed there (bad practice) but mostly you’ve got just a list of other groups like “Western Division”, “Marketing” and all those (good practice). |
Cognos Enterprise Planning 10.1 is out
What’s new Fix list
Nothing revolutionary, performance improvements, fighting with Java-based Rich Client memory footprint and performance. Publishing enhancements seem interesting.
Since BI upgrade is required as well, I’d wait for first couple of BI service packs before trying this one out.
Should we use TM1 for reporting?
Another point worth clearing out: I really think TM1 is not a very good choice for OLAP reporting engine. On a decent data volumes, of course, millions of rows will be fast as lightning ;) Let me explain why.
ETL Testing
I’m a fan of testing in each DWH project, because it allows to:
be sure that at least tested parts work * change logic w\o retesting all results Receiving “All OK” in the morning means that there’s time for a cup of coffee ) A list of approaches I use for testing ETL-procedures: ‘Water in a Sieve’ Checking whether we could carry all required data into DWH without ‘spilling’ it out.
Microsoft SQL Server reporting database configuration
A check-list for using Microsoft SQL Server as a reporting database. This is a ‘be aware’ list for myself in first place, since I forget some details as time passes.
Cognos PowerPlay Transformer Limitations
Just a bullet list of things that separate Cognos Transformer from being a capable OLAP-tool in modern market. Neither of these problems will be solved, I think, and this will lead to Transfomer’s death in near future (about 5 years, imho, given huge userbase).
Cognos Powerplay zero suppression
Extracting from a discussion from sql.ru forum:
PowerPlay performs very bad when it comes to large and sparse (with big number of nulls and zeros) cross-tabs.
Modern OLAP engines are specially optimized for NonEmpty MDX clause, which is default report generation option.
Cognos BI temporary files (UDA)
Just a link to developerWorks thread where Phil_W gives an excellent explanation. Kudos to Phil, all his post are truly brilliant: concise, informative and insightful. I use ProcessExplorer to find PIDs too.