In Cognos 10.2.1 and earlier versions, the phrase that most accurately described a multi-page report was “wrestling match.” Long list reports would flow on for page after page until somewhere along the way you ran into that chart you knew you added but were starting to forget about. Defining page breaks helped some, but following the flow of a multi-page report was often a tiresome process that left your mouse hand cramped from clicking Page Down. With the release of Cognos 10.2.2, IBM changed all that with tabbed reports. Read more
You might have missed it if you weren’t closely following the situation or already using the platform, but around the middle of last month IBM forever changed the concept of self-service analytics when they quietly moved Watson Analytics out of beta and into general availability. Watson Analytics is a new cloud-based application that enables an individual to work with their data at a level of ease and intuitiveness that we’ve not seen before. As a sibling of the IBM Watson family, it has inherited a powerful natural language processing capability and as such it enables an individual to query data not with a programming language like SQL, but in the form of a natural language dialogue. Read more
TM1 cubes have now become the OLAP solution of choice for many Cognos BI environments. Because of this emerging trend, there are some techniques and tips that TM1 developers should be familiar with when building a cube for Cognos BI reports. Initially, the Cognos BI platform was built around Transformer OLAP cubes. Transformer cubes are similar to TM1 in many aspects but there are some important structural differences that affect how users consume them in Cognos BI. This article will discuss in detail some of these differences and how to utilize some hidden features of TM1 to build a cube that will mimic the structural features available in Cognos Transformer and make your Cognos BI developer’s job easier. Read more
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