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IBM Cognos Analytic Applications

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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.

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Creating Dynamic IBM Cognos Reports with jQuery

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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

The Relationship between Developer and Consumer

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The relationship between the report developer and report consumer often times have very little definition, with neither side having a concise picture of the best alignment of roles and responsibilities. The report developer has a clear understanding of the capability of the tools whereas the consumer may not. Conversely the consumer has a unique understanding of the business while the developer may not. When this disconnect is not addressed, the value of your BI tool may not truly be realized. Read more

What can Business Intelligence do for you?

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In a time of financial instability, corporate investments must be thought out very carefully. That said, some investments can offer benefits almost immediately after implementation. There is one that can help you increase operational efficiency, harmonize departmental reporting, and provide immediate and up-to-date insight on your business at the click of your mouse. This investment gives you access to view the many different perspectives of your organization’s most crucial asset: its data. Read more

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Extend, Enhance and Integrate Your BI Solution: The New IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service

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IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service (CMS), a new web service shipped with the 8.4 Platform, is an API (application programming interface) that automatically and securely exposes BI content as a web service for use in operational applications, business process management (BPM) workflows and mashups. With this capability, you now can extend your BI content into existing applications and processes that are critical to your business users as well as add new context by “mashing” content with other applications.  Read more

Determinants – The Answer to a Framework Manager Mystery

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Editor’s Note:  This blog was originally posted on February 1, 2010, and has been reviewed/updated on October 5, 2020.  Quite some changes have been applied to Framework Manager tool over the past decade, we find that the tuning of determinants is still a valid approach to address issues of sharing dimensions among multi-facts, especially when two fact tables join the dimension tables at different level. For instance, sales goal vs actual sales, with sales goals typically are set at month/quarter level while actual sales are at day level.   If it is just one or two measures involved in entire model, you may consider to create alias of dimension tables to join different fact tables at each level or construct custom summary in report itself.   Have you implemented in other creative way? We would love to hear your feedback. Read more

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Understanding the Cognos Application Firewall

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If you’ve spent any time administering or configuring an IBM Cognos installation, then you have likely encountered and possibly pondered the feature known as the Cognos Application Firewall (CAF). The name itself seems to attract attention, and we are often asked for additional information about this feature by administrators and information security professionals who work closely with the IBM Cognos platform at their organizations.

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Dynamic Prompting based on User Selection

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In this month’s Tech Tips we’ll run through a demo on how to display dynamic prompts based on user selection. This is especially useful if you want to offer a lot of functionality in a report without confusing the user with a myriad of unnecessary prompting. Hidden prompts will appear when the user makes specific selections in other prompts.

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A Tool to Standardize The Look and Feel of Your Reports

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In last month’s Tips and Tricks we discussed how to standardize a “skin” in each of your different Cognos 8 environments. This allowed all users to receive the same look and feel when interacting with Cognos Connection. We’re going to take it one step further and discuss the benefits of using a built-in tool called the Layout Component Reference to accomplish this at the individual report level.

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Understanding Star Schema

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If your house is anything like mine, then it would be called Google.  You have to search to get anything you want.  Even if your house is well organized, to find a book  by title or author you have to sift through the bookcase.  However, if you decide to count all of your books regardless of their location in your house, it is more of a daunting effort.  To make things complicated, what if you wanted to also categorize them as fiction, non-fiction etc.  Imagine the chaos if several people decided to count all of your books at the same time. This is what happens when analytical reporting is based on a transaction processing system. Read more