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Ironside’s Cloud-Based Netezza Solution Tops IBM Award Finalists

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Ironside Recognized as 2015 IBM Beacon Award Finalist for Outstanding Information Management Solution

This year, Ironside received the high honor of being placed among the finalists for IBM’s prestigious Beacon Award in the category of Outstanding Information Management solution. The accolade displays IBM’s recognition of an unprecedented and groundbreaking project for one of Ironside’s top clients that included an end-to-end enterprise information management architecture that was entirely cloud-based. Additionally, and in partnership with IBM SoftLayer, Ironside  envisioned and executed on a never-before-seen cloud implementation that allowed the client to leverage the unparalleled power of an IBM PureData for Analytics  infrastructure without having to bring it onsite.  PureData for Analytics, more commonly known in the industry as Netezza, is one of the most robust and sophisticated data warehouses currently on the market. Now that we’ve set the stage, let’s take a deeper look into how Ironside is making Netezza more easily available than ever before. Read more

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Ironside Webinar Series: Select the Right Cognos 10.2.2 Tool for the Job

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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

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Case Study: Migrating Cognos from Series 7 to Version 10 with SDK

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Migrating Cognos is a highly involved process, especially when you’re moving across multiple versions. When one of our clients needed this kind of migration completed, our experts turned to Cognos SDK to streamline the process and adjust the system to meet the client’s needs exactly. Read more

Alternate Hierarchies vs. Ragged Hierarchies

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To a TM1 developer, alternate hierarchies are sometimes synonymous with ragged hierarchies. When designing cubes for Cognos BI, it’s important to remember that they are structurally different concepts. How you model them in TM1 will affect your Cognos BI reports. Continuing where we left off last month, we will discuss some best practices for handling these hierarchy structures in a Cognos BI context.

Note: As of TM1 10.2, alternate hierarchies cannot be defined separately in the }HierarchyProperties cube. Read more

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Top 5 Trends in Cloud Data Warehousing and Analytics for 2015

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In 2014, cloud data warehousing services led the information management category in increased adoption rate, jumping from 24% to 34% according to surveys by Information Week . For organizations challenged by data urgency needs that can be difficult to meet with traditional data warehouse infrastructures, cloud services offer an alternative that can provide value at the pace of business, often supplementing existing, on-premise data warehouses. With new technologies and advancements in the cloud data warehousing space, 2015 should prove to be an exciting year for those looking to build out or implement new cloud based DW programs. Whether you are in the midst of a cloud DW initiative, looking to start one soon, or just getting to know the technology – the five trends that we will discuss below are items you will want to keep in mind for the coming year. Read more

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Tabbed Reports in Cognos 10.2.2: The New, Easy Way to Make Clean, Consumable Multi-Page Reports

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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

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Information for All: Watson Analytics and IBM’s Self-Service Revolution

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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

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Building Best Practice TM1 Cubes for Cognos BI Reporting

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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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Ironside Tech Tip: Dynamically Selecting Filters Utilizing Before or After Aggregation via a Prompt

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Synopsis:

Enable a user via a prompt to pre-select if a value will be filtered before or after aggregation.

Overview:

Normally, the report author hard codes filters placed on facts in the Properties pane as before or after aggregation. While this is adequate in most report scenarios, hard coding can be limiting if the executing end-user would like to dynamically choose which aggregation method to use on the fact value at run time. When creating typical reports, this option is not obvious or apparently possible. Read more

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Ironside Top 5 of 2014

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The report is in! See the list of topics that readers, like you, found most interesting and that made it into our top 5 of 2014.

Top Training Tip

Creating a Burst Table for a Cognos Report  – Do you know how to create an external data file to use as a burst table for a Cognos report? If not, you can find step-by-step instructions in this guide. Learn how to create a Burst Table Read more