My Business Intelligence Experience

I recently had a requirement where the user wanted data from an existing Crosstab report to repeat every line so he can use the output in excel for comparison/analysis. It must be an old trick for most of us as I see so many posts around but none of them are straight forward and are hard to follow so i thought why not log it here, besides its only been 10 months since I shared anything. Sorry guys I'm in support right now so no time to explore new tips and tricks or maybe i'm being lazy ;) By default Crosstab groups columns nested based on the position on the cross tab, the trick here is to identify your lowest and highest level of data granularity. Lets pick the below crosstab as an example with PRODUCT, DESCRIPTION, LOCATION as nested dimension columns and default measure of SALES $ across MONTHS.                   Measure: Sales $      MONTH 1 | MONTH 2 .................................... Product | Descripti...

Recently one of the users pointed out a strange issue that data is not showing up in the Poweplay Studio work area(where you drag and drop cube items), user was able to see the dimension and measure folders on the left hand side. Initially i thought it has to do with a setting in users IE, so I suggested opening up the same in Firefox and it worked without issues. Deleting cookies,temp files, restoring default settings din't help either. After struggling  for 15-20 minutes and considerable amount of googling gave a wild answer...guess? It was ZOOM that caused this freaky effect in IE, at times I do this too. If you hold your CTRL key and use mouse scroll bar it shrinks or zooms any page, when it zooms somehow the Powerplay work Area disappears. 

Came across this slick option that will help you fit multiple Crosstabs or Lists into one page in Report Studio and thought would share it here. In report studio go to: File > Report Properties > Page break by data container for interactive HTML : Yes If this doesn't work make sure you put the Crosstabs/Lists in table cells inside Block.

Most of the company's that have multi server Cognos environments face challenges time to time on keeping environments up an running by minimizing outage times and crashes. From past couple of years I have implemented auto recycling/rebooting on windows NT Cognos servers for two main reasons: 1) Get rid of dump/garbage files due to report runs. 2) Ensures System stability if implemented weekly or monthly. With a little help from our NT guys we came up with a system reboot script which also emails a message, I scheduled this script as NT job sequentially(CM, BCM,DISP,DISP....) on all servers for a window of 1 hour every Saturday. This setup works really good except that one of the servers which is a dispatcher that always comes up at the end fails to initialize EVENT Service. So I was looking for ways to restart cognos service after system reboot and have the logs emailed automatically. Starting cognos services from a script is an easy task but to check if the services...

I came across this slick KB article on how to get the list of active sessions/users currently on any cognos environment and implemented it. https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21385278 After I got this to work the servlet that runs only retrieves the CAMID and the session start time. I started looking around in the content store tables and was able to successfully  retrieve the CAMID and the associated  LDAP ID/User ID. I made this a query subject in the Audit model and joined it to the security groups table and created a report that will give me User ID, CAMID, AD Group, Name , Email. Query : SELECT  distinct ldap_id,     last_name,     first_name,     email,     objid as CAMID     FROM            (SELECT c33.cmid user_id, UPPER (c33.NAME) ldap_id,                   c1.surname last_name, c1.givenname first_...

Recently I had a challenging requirement to retrieve some users My Folders content whose active directory profiles were accidentally deleted and recreated. This requirement came to me after three days the profiles have been recreated, because there were profiles with new GUID in active directory which is nothing but CAMID in cognos they were not able to see any of their reports in cognos. First i started importing the content store deployment from 3 days ago(this had to be extracted with a point in time copy as it gets overwritten every night) to a sandbox and it ran for 5hrs and showing errors on some user profiles saying their CAMID is missing. After struggling for 10 hours I found this slick SDK script that gave some hope. Basically this SDK script on cognos KB queries the content store for Orphaned My Folders and saves them to a folder in Public Folders with CAMID's. We then had our DBA's restore the content store to the point where users had old CAMID's and I po...