As we’ve mentioned before, as of April 2018 there will be limited extended support for Cognos 10.x. Sure, that sounds like a long time from now, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from my time in enterprise IT, it’s that making a change is like turning a battleship. You need to start actively planning for it and plotting your course way ahead of time to ensure everything runs smoothly. Read more
Tag Archive for: cognos BI
Even though we’re already blazing full speed ahead into 2016, it’s always important to take a minute to look back at the past year and recognize the high points that made it special. In addition to being named a Boston Business Journal Pacesetter for the second time, making the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies for the third time, and receiving IBM’s 2015 Business Intelligence Partner of the Year award, we’ve produced several valuable and popular pieces of thought leadership to enrich the analytics community. Here are the top 5 articles 2015 saw us release. We hope you find them useful as you start your journey into the new year. Read more
This article is the second in our Ironside Public Data Powered series, which outlines how we can leverage public data to help us gain insights that drive stronger, faster business decisions. It will take a look at adding public data into a cloud-based data warehouse. Read more
On April 14th, Ironside hosted a What to Expect for Your Cognos Environment webinar, where Ironside’s Technical Services Manager presented on how your Cognos environment should behave along with tips and tricks for making any necessary improvements. Read more
On February 24th, Ironside hosted Select the Right Cognos 10.2.2 Tool for the Job: Real-Life Selection Process Leveraging Your use Case webinar, where Ironside’s Senior Consulant De Hsieh, presented an in-depth look into which of the many Cognos tools available are right for which jobs. During this webinar we reviewed some of the issues your organization are currently facing and present our thoughts about and proven practices for their delivery. 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
Difficulty: Easy
Required Ingredients: Report Studio report
Scenario:
You have a highly formatted report in Report Studio and you need a better understanding of how the report is structured. Some of the items in the report maybe hidden and you can’t easily see how things are nested. Luckily, Page Structure view can help with that. Read more
Over the years I have successfully used the ancestor(), parallelPeriods(), periodToDate(), aggregate(), and set() dimensional functions to develop robust and durable dimensional reporting solutions in IBM Cognos BI.
I had the opportunity to go to lunch the other day with one of my clients from a few years ago and they told me that the profit and loss reports that I wrote for them were still in use. These reports used no year or month members (directly) and required little if any maintenance over the last two years, despite daily refreshes of the source PowerCube. Read more
Even if you don’t have access to the RAVE visualizations available in Cognos 10.2.1, there are still some options to produce non-standard charts and simulate things such as heat maps using older Cognos versions. With some creative HTML use, you can set up a heat map that responds to various conditions in your reports. This article will discuss how to implement this structure. Read more
The IBM Cognos platform provides complete auditing capabilities that enable auditing and managing system usage. By default, system messages, errors, and other product details are logged to flat files that reside in the log directory. IBM Cognos BI provides an additional option to output audit usage information to a relational database. With the usage audit data stored in a relational data source, reporting becomes possible. IBM provides a sample audit model that includes several sample reports to assist in providing immediate benefit from the audit data. In this article, we’re going to discuss specific audit tables and activities to tailor your auditing needs. Read more
Ironside is a data, analytics, and AI consulting and technology implementation company. We work with clients to understand their business objectives and day-to-day challenges, then employ our deep expertise in data strategy, architecture and engineering, integration, business intelligence, AI, and generative AI. We create technical solutions and practical approaches designed to drive smarter, data-driven decisions across a company and help it move further and faster toward its business goals.