My Business Intelligence Experience

Just happen to come across this interesting feature in Cognos that I used a while ago in Reportnet which allows Data Caching for faster report runs. Cognos 8 supports user session based data caching for report prompts/LOV's and data, to use this feature you will have to edit the Governor settings in the Framework Manager model and check the 'Allow usage of local cache' box. On the Report Studio report you can use the 'Use Local Cache' property of a query to selectively enable caching. Note: If you are doing live reporting this feature must be turned off.

This link gives all the details on different versions of Cognos and it's compatible softwares. https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27014432

I was trying to change the temp file location to an allocated shared drive on Cognos servers but there is an issue with one of the servers not being able to start application services in tomcat while starting services.I'm working with cognos support on this, but what i don't understand is how can an other server work and not this. All servers have separate folders under the share and write access to the cognos account, the only difference is this network share was allocated for the server that works without an issue, but I did share the folder on the temp drive and then created sub folders for each server and made sure Cognos account has write access. Hopefully I'll get an answer soon :).

Cognos can be configured to allow users to save report outputs on an network drive as opposed to content store. This feature comes in handy when you have lot of business users using a central file at a network location and also you can setup FTP jobs to send these output files across networks. I have listed the steps on how to configure it: 1) On your Content Manager install edit the 'Archive Location File System Root' to the network location.     Cognos Configuration>Actions>Edit Global Configuration..>General> 2) Make sure the user account that Cognos services are running under have write permissions on this share. 3) Now this file share location has to be configures in Cognos Administration portal.    Configuration> Dispatchers and Services > Click on Define File System location(Highlighted in yellow) 4) Click New    5) You can setup multiple location based on folders within the share and how you want to set up security. ...

We all know how to use the rank( ) function in cognos, it basically ranks the measure across a dimesion by weight. The basic syntax is rank([Data_Item] ASC/DESC) which will give a result set, but most of the times we need to just show top X or bottom X. For this requirement we can use A--> running-count (rank([Data_Item] ASC/DESC)) and then add a filter like A<=X to get top X, but there is a catch here what if there are multiple rows that have the same rank and you still want to show them. In this case use A--> running-count (rank(distinct([Data_Item] ASC/DESC))) and then a filter A<=X. To get the bottom X try this: A >= (maximum (running-count (rank(distinct([Data_Item] ASC/DESC)))) - X) There are multiple ways to achive this requirement, i saw couple of other interesting ways on the net but I used this and found simple enough to share.

There a tons of freeware apps available that you can use to monitor CPU usage on Cognos servers and this really helps when you have a distributed environment as you can monitor the CPU on each of these servers right from you desktop/laptop without having to RDP. I use the Performance Monitoring service available in Windows Server OS . I found this link with a good explanation on how it works. http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/HealthCheck/Processor_Health.htm You can set this up from your local machine(XP) using perfmon tool. From windows RUN type perfmon that will bring up the Performance Monitoring window where you can add counters of the servers, if it throws an error that's because of security or counters not enabled on the machine you are trying to add, your NT guys should be able to fix it.

I find this feature in Cognos 8 slick as this not only lets you manipulate the prompts and output format from URL but also helps you to integrate reports into other legacy/corporate portals/share point sites. The best feature I like is how you can selective choose different headers to be displayed and pass Parameters. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/page123.html

This is my experience on upgrading a windows environment from cognos 8.3 to cognos 8.4. I din't use Upgrade Manger or other tools available from cognos to see how the reports or packages behave after the upgrade as i did the full content store export and import due to lack of resources and considering that 8.3 and 8.4 are not very different. I did this on a sandbox first where all developers tested reports and confirmed they saw no difference. After the upgrade there were issues with the way jobs were running as most of them were failing with socket/pogo errors and the ones that ran fine were sending emails from a different email than whats configured under notification. The fix was available on one of the forums where we edit a file and that fixed it. This was a distributed install with individual cognos components on each machine, after the upgrade over the weekend it ran fine and then on monday it suddenly crashed and nothing worked so i had to install a stand alone install on...

I read this document couple of years ago on dimensional functions and found it useful when you are dealing with report development in Report Studio based on Transformer Cubes. These functions can also be applied on DMR reporting as DMR's support both MDX and relational functions. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/page82.html

I find this tool useful to read logs when dealing with security errors, tomcat logs and java errors. You can find this with in the congnos install directory \bin( logconsole.exe) http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/page80.html