On February 18th, 2014, Ironside hosted a Cognos Dynamic Cubes webinar to introduce the capabilities of this new, powerful tool. Led by Ironside’s Michael Vollmer, Senior BI consultant, and Francois Ross, Regional Vice President, we gave attendees insights into how dynamic cube interfaces empower end users to access data at much faster speeds.
Cognos Dynamic Cubes are an OLAP solution that extend the existing dynamic query mode on your current IBM Cognos BI server. Leveraging the caching capabilities of dynamic query mode, dynamic cubes are able to deliver high performance analytics over large data volumes. We learned in the webinar that one thing to keep in mind when building your dynamic cube is that your data mart should be modeled using star or snowflake schema.
Michael pointed out that one of the great things about dynamic cubes is that there is no additional server software to install to leverage dynamic cubes in your existing BI environment.. The only limit to the capabilities of this software is the amount of RAM on your server; it is recommend that you have a 64-bit server to take full advantage of this new technology.
A couple of tools that you should be familiar with when using Cognos Dynamic Cubes include:
– Dynamic Cube Designer
– Cognos BI- Administration and Data Stores
– Dynamic Query Analyzer – Aggregate Advisor
Michael also stated that the key to the successful delivery of dynamic cubes is to define the cache using Aggregate Advisor. Aggregate Advisor analyzes the model and/or usage patterns and recommends aggregates that will make reports and analysis run even faster.
In the webinar, Michael and Francois go into specific details on the capabilities of dynamic cube, and go through the process of building a cube in a demo. If you were not able to join us for the live webinar, we do have a recording available for viewing. We hope that you find this information useful and that you feel free to contact us with any addition questions you may have.
You can access the webinar and slide deck by filling out the following form:
