Tag Archive for: Cognos

clock graphicSecurity in Cognos is extremely robust, permitting or denying very precise access to data elements in a package, data source, or even to row level access in a database. Read & Execute permissions are usually applied to a report allowing certain Groups or Roles the ability to run a report. However, you can also allow or deny access to a report to only let it execute within specific hours of the day. Read more

Difficulty: Easy

Required Ingredients: Prompt macros and static values within a prompt parameter.

Scenario:

You have some existing reports that prompt on Year and Month.

Users would like a better experience by having default selections provided for them. For scheduling purposes you’d also like to set relative time so the report can run based on current month and current year. You can accomplish this using macros. Read more

Ironside, a Premium IBM Business Partner since 1999, is pleased to announce another expansion into the mid-Atlantic region by opening its newest office in Philadelphia, PA.

Claire Zyvitski recently joined Ironside as a Senior Sales Executive heading up sales for the mid-Atlantic region supporting the IBM Cognos BA Team. Claire has seven years of partner expertise with selling Cognos software and consulting services in the Business Intelligence, Performance Management, and Data Warehousing space. She is an accomplished, driven sales professional with experience in both large Fortune 500 companies and small businesses.

Claire’s focus will be the IBM Business Analytics customers in the mid-Atlantic region (primarily Philadelphia, Washington, and North Carolina). Claire can be reached via (781) 860-8840 x232 or via email at czyvitski@ironsidegroup.com.

Ironside is putting the final touches on a client outreach plan for the final six months of 2013 in the mid-Atlantic region. Make sure you check out our events page for a list of customer events, conferences, and workshops!Philadelphia

We look forward to making additional marketing investments in the mid-Atlantic region over the coming months. Some other marketing examples include BI health checks, implementation jump starts, BI competency center reviews, workshops, lunch n learns, and proof of concepts. We are open to hearing from you about additional ways we can help your prospects and customers.

Lastly, Ironside Group is currently recruiting exceptional business intelligence and corporate performance management pre/post sales resources based in the Mid-Atlantic region, please Contact Us if you are aware of any highly qualified and experienced people.

The Ironside Group is a multidisciplinary technology and advisory consulting firm that specializes in all facets of Business Intelligence. We offer service lines in the areas of business intelligence, data warehousing, predictive analytics, and enterprise planning. We are a long-standing and well-respected IBM Premier Partner, and we specialize in designing and implementing enterprise Business Intelligence solutions utilizing the IBM Business Analytics software suite. In addition to our consulting practice, we offer fully hosted and managed IBM Business Intelligence solutions on our cloud platform, as well as a comprehensive professional training in every facet of the IBM Business Analytics solution stack.

Upcoming Events

Wednesday, July 10th – Philly SIPS & Consumable Analytics Event

If you’d like more information on Ironside, check out our company story. We’d love to talk about what we can do to boost your analytics potential in the mid-Atlantic.

Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE) is the technology behind IBM’s extensible visualization offering. With the ability to create your own visualizations and to utilize those that others have created, the bounds of what have historically been accepted as the limits of IBM Cognos charts and graphs are gone. Read more

The New England Cognos Users Group is an amazing opportunity to network and collaborate with other IBM Cognos Professionals in the Northeast Region. Each event is packed with informative talks and demonstrations from local organizations that highlight their own applied experiences with IBM Cognos software. Experts from the Ironside Group are always in attendance more than happy to answer your toughest questions or help you down the path to resolving your most bothersome issues. Attendance is always free and open to the public. Read more

Editor’s Note:  This blog was originally posted on August 1, 2010 and has been reviewed and updated on 10/5/2020 with Cognos Analytics 11.1.7.  We find that these best practice tips about metadata modeling are still very useful to build solid data foundation for reports, especially cardinality settings and stich query controls as they are critical modeling techniques. These procedures are also applicable to Cognos new web based metadata modeling component – the Data Module, which is greatly adopted by self-service authors and when Cognos is hosted in cloud (no need to install Framework Manger tool).

Last month’s article described the overall approach for best practice model design using the 4 layer architecture. In this month’s article, I’ll describe some advanced issues which arise during model design, and how best to deal with them. Given the limitless and complex situations that can come up during modeling, these techniques may or may not apply to your specific situation. Read more

As consultants the first question we are often asked by our customers is can we build reports directly against our transactional systems.    While there are some exceptions our general best practice is to recommend against this type of architecture.

The reasons are long and detailed, but simply put, some high level reasons not to build reporting systems off of normalized databases are:

  • Query performance
  • General production system performance
  • Aggregate view of data vs transactional view
  • Complex SQL
  • Normalized databases are typically tuned for simple queries

The discussion then leads to questions surrounding data mart or warehouse creation.  Typical initial concerns are time, money, maintenance, and flexibility. All which are real considerations when traveling this path.

Read more

There is a growing need to provide more dynamic and interactive reporting for technically savvy consumers that have elevated expectations for how their data should be presented to them. With the arrival of IBM Cognos 8.4 comes Cognos Mashup Services, an API that empowers us to build modern looking and feeling web applications using IBM Cognos Reports as a data source. But what do you do if you want to deliver that sort of functionality within Cognos Viewer? The following presentation describes how you can leverage the powerful open-source JavaScript library jQuery to add dynamic user interface elements to your reports or provide functionality previously unavailable. Demonstrations include dynamically filtered and sortable list reports as well as drill-down enabled Tree Map data visualizations.

Download the presentation for Creating Dynamic IBM Cognos Reports with jQuery

While the IBM Cognos 8 BI application suite provides best of breed capabilities and user acceptance, the one size fits all approach necessary for software vendors to allow their applications to remain business agnostic can often leave organizations lacking a focused solution to a specific issue. Providing a process to extend and add value to your organization’s solutions by utilizing existing application architecture ensures that the company continues to realize the maximum ROI from their Cognos software. The Cognos SDK provides a method for IT professionals to collaboratively utilize additional applications, streamline business processes and reduce manual work with a minimal resource commitment. Read more