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Netezza – Design Best Practices & Guidelines

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Today’s big data challenges for both transactions and analytics are increasing demands on data systems. Traditional data warehouses sometimes struggle as they are often NOT designed to meet the demands of advanced analytics on big data. That’s where solutions like Netezza come in.

IBM PureData for Analytics (formerly Netezza) is a data warehouse appliance that has a purpose-built analytics engine and an integrated database, server, and storage. With simple deployment, out-of-the-box optimization, no tuning, and minimal ongoing maintenance, the IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance has the industry’s fastest time-to-value and lowest total cost of-ownership. Read more

Success by Design: Planning Your Information Management Infrastructure

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Planning an information management infrastructure is a fun and exciting activity for everyone, whether they work with information systems or not. What? It isn’t? Then why are so many people building information management infrastructure solutions in Access and Excel? That’s not IM you say? Well in a way it is, though we can agree that it is neither sufficient nor sustainable for just about any organization. So why do it? Read more

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Performing Data Warehouse Validation with IBM Cognos Report Studio

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Reporting should start with a “single source of truth” and end with a “single version of truth.” Delivery of accurate reporting information is paramount in the day-to-day operations of every organization. Some of the methods for maintaining data Integrity (within the data warehouse) would be to apply referential integrity and maintain primary keys on tables. In addition, associated ETL processes can utilize checksums, or record counts, when loading the warehouse. Once the data is in the warehouse, the next step would be to model the data for exposure to the end-users. Read more

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Create an Active Report with a Data Deck

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With the introduction of Active Report, IBM Cognos 10 report designers now have the ability to quickly and effectively create dynamic, powerful, interactive, self-contained reports available offline and on the go, which are highly sought after by report consumers.

Active Report’s intuitive, drag and drop interface makes it incredibly easy to add interactivity and functionality to reports, including variable text items, tab controls, and data decks.

To illustrate the ease of use, this tutorial will walk you through the steps for creating a simple report containing a data deck in Active Report. Data decks allow report developers to add modern and visually appealing animations to reports. Using master-detail relationships, a variety of data containers can be inserted into a deck and updated to show only values selected in an Active Report control.  Read more

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Database Structure in IBM Cognos Warehouses

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A Cognos report is only as good as its data. How that data is organized will affect performance, accuracy, and ease of authoring. There is no single solution — before you get can your data right, you need to know how it is going to be used.

Know Your Requirements

In an ideal world, databases would produce the data for any kind of report with equal speed and ease. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Business Intelligence queries, in particular, frequently push the envelope of what databases can be expected to deliver. In order to keep performance acceptable, design compromises need to be made. Usually, this means making certain types of queries faster at the cost of making all other queries slower. If the faster queries are the ones the users care about, then the compromise will be a success. Read more

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Database Suitability Assessment and IBM Cognos Framework Manager Best Practices

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As consultants, we have found that the majority of struggling IBM Cognos implementations we encounter are due to either poor framework model design, or more often, a flawed database architecture. The case of the latter can present itself in a number of ways, but in the worst cases, we’ve discovered reporting applications built upon highly normalized OLTP systems that are ineffective and detrimental to both analytical and operational performance of an organization’s information systems. Another common case is an implementation of Cognos upon an existing data warehouse where users are provided with unfettered ad-hoc access to the data source for the first time, exposing previously unforeseen or unknown data quality issues. Read more

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Integrating an Enterprise Wiki with IBM Cognos 8

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Beginning with IBM Cognos 8.4 and higher, IBM provides a means of linking package objects from within Cognos Viewer or any of the studios, to IBM Business Glossary to serve as a central, web-based repository for documentation. If you do not own Business Glossary but you do have an existing enterprise wiki that houses your own organizations business documentation, with a little bit of ingenuity we can integrate that resource using the same inline facilities. Read more

Data Warehousing in an SAP-Centric Environment

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SAP-R/3 is one of the most common ERP applications for manufacturing industries.  The data warehouse for such installations has been Oracle.  The biggest pain point for Oracle implementations has been getting the data out of SAP-R/3, which involves complex processes and expert domain knowledge.  With the introduction of SAP-BW, the data warehouse suite, ’Getting the data out’ of SAP-R/3 requires little effort.  Over years, SAP-BW has matured to handle large data volumes and meet the service level agreements for large enterprises.  The question then arises, especially for those organizations with an Oracle data warehouse, if moving to SAP-BW makes long term sense. There are several factors to be considered, the core being organizational commitment and long term vision.  One of the factors is understanding the differences between SAP-BW and Oracle within the context of an enterprise data warehouse. Read more