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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

IBM Cognos 10 Upgrade Planning

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Since IBM Cognos 10 was released last winter, upgrading has become a very hot topic among the Cognos user community. Why upgrade? There are many reasons: new features and functionalities, easier to use, better performance and more. Cognos 10 will not only serve your business better but also deliver a revolutionary new experience as well as expand traditional business intelligence with planning, scenario modeling, real-time monitoring and predictive analytics in one place. Here are some eye-catching new features: Read more

Enhanced Tomcat Monitoring with IBM Cognos 10

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IBM Cognos Tomcat Heap Monitoring with PSI-Probe

Some of the most common requests that we field from our clients are related to IBM Cognos application performance tuning. Most administrators have the desire to squeeze every last drop of performance out of their applications and make the most out of the hardware they are hosted upon and Cognos is no exception to this practice. Read more

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Predictive Analytics with IBM SPSS

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SPSS Predictive AnalyticsIBM Business Analytics software is designed to deliver complete, insightful, and accurate information for decision makers to make more effective decisions. As part of this portfolio, IBM SPSS Predictive Analytics software specializes in predictive analytics which organizations can rely on to predict future outcomes based on patterns found in historical data. Organizations in almost all industries of every size can benefit from the IBM SPSS technology to provide clear and actionable insight into current performance as well as use the information to drive better outcomes for future business. While Business Intelligence can help to monitor the current and past performance of the business operation, Predictive Analytics can answer questions on why the business is performing in a certain manner and how it can be improved in the future. Read more

Dynamic Date Dimensions in Cognos 10

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Date dimensions are in high demand. Nearly every warehouse and data mart has at least one date dimension. They are extremely useful in Cognos reporting – end users frequently want to analyze data by year, quarter, month, etc.

However, there are some things that are difficult to do with a “standard” date dimension. For example, calculating period-to-date in a relational data source, or setting a report to always default to the current quarter both take more effort than they should to implement in Cognos (and both require Report Studio to accomplish). Read more

Hosting IBM Cognos BI on Amazon Cloud

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With the growing popularity of cloud computing, hosting a BI infrastructure on the cloud is becoming an emerging trend for organizations to conveniently access a pool of scalable computing resources per an on-demand basis. This article aims to provide our fellow practitioner an overview of hosting IBM Cognos solutions on one of the most commonly used public cloud computing systems; Amazon EC2. Read more

Session Timeout 101

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As a system administrator there are a number of factors that must be considered in regards to overall system stability, usability and performance. One of the many configurations to consider is the Session Timeout settings. For example, you might be asked to set a Session Timeout to a certain number of minutes to prevent reports from consuming resources for an extended period of time or your users may be complaining the Session Timeout is too short to run some reports. This of course leads to the question: How do I adjust the Session Timeout settings? Before we get to the answer, let’s first take a quick look where a Session Timeout may be generated. Read more

IBM Cognos 10 Bullet Charts

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Cognos 10 marks a significant improvement in a new charting engine. Charts are without a doubt, a very powerful tool to deliver information. The chart enhancements made in IBM Cognos 10 focus on improving the effectiveness of this communication. This article discusses the Bullet Chart.

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IBM Cognos 10: Changing The Global Report Style Sheet

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In the past we have introduced a couple of ways to standardize report’s appearances such as designing effective IBM Cognos Report Studio templates and the use of Layout Component References to help centralize and simplify repetitive report design tasks. These techniques mainly focus on changing the look and feel within Report Studio. However sometimes you may find it is difficult to modify the pre-defined report style or there is need to make the changes across all reports. For instance, all your reports will be embedded in your organization’s web application, and one of the requirements is to have all hyperlinks colored in gray and without an underline in order to match the corporate style. In those scenarios, you should consider another approach: globally change report style sheets. Read more

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IBM Cognos 10 Business Insight Advanced: 5 Key Features that Can Transform Your Organization

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Back in October when IBM Cognos 10 was first released, I initially touted Business Insight Advanced (BIA) as the single-most important enhancement over IBM Cognos 8. After a few months of hands-on usage, I am sticking to my initial assessment. Here are five key features that I’ve identified as having the greatest potential for a positive impact on practical business intelligence within most organizations. Read more