During 2009, IBM Cognos introduced Cognos Express, its “one-stop BI and planning solution purpose-built to meet the needs of midsize companies”. While large organizations have been implementing Business Intelligence solutions for years, mid-size organizations were often left in a quandary wondering whether to spend time and money on a solution that did not necessarily fit their needs. With a more streamlined implementation, web and excel based interfaces, and attractive pricing, Cognos Express is a promising step in closing the gap between mid-sized companies and enterprise Performance Management Software. Read more
As consultants the first question we are often asked by our customers is can we build reports directly against our transactional systems. While there are some exceptions our general best practice is to recommend against this type of architecture.
The reasons are long and detailed, but simply put, some high level reasons not to build reporting systems off of normalized databases are:
- Query performance
- General production system performance
- Aggregate view of data vs transactional view
- Complex SQL
- Normalized databases are typically tuned for simple queries
The discussion then leads to questions surrounding data mart or warehouse creation. Typical initial concerns are time, money, maintenance, and flexibility. All which are real considerations when traveling this path.
There is a growing need to provide more dynamic and interactive reporting for technically savvy consumers that have elevated expectations for how their data should be presented to them. With the arrival of IBM Cognos 8.4 comes Cognos Mashup Services, an API that empowers us to build modern looking and feeling web applications using IBM Cognos Reports as a data source. But what do you do if you want to deliver that sort of functionality within Cognos Viewer? The following presentation describes how you can leverage the powerful open-source JavaScript library jQuery to add dynamic user interface elements to your reports or provide functionality previously unavailable. Demonstrations include dynamically filtered and sortable list reports as well as drill-down enabled Tree Map data visualizations.
Download the presentation for Creating Dynamic IBM Cognos Reports with jQuery
The relationship between the report developer and report consumer often times have very little definition, with neither side having a concise picture of the best alignment of roles and responsibilities. The report developer has a clear understanding of the capability of the tools whereas the consumer may not. Conversely the consumer has a unique understanding of the business while the developer may not. When this disconnect is not addressed, the value of your BI tool may not truly be realized. Read more
In a time of financial instability, corporate investments must be thought out very carefully. That said, some investments can offer benefits almost immediately after implementation. There is one that can help you increase operational efficiency, harmonize departmental reporting, and provide immediate and up-to-date insight on your business at the click of your mouse. This investment gives you access to view the many different perspectives of your organization’s most crucial asset: its data. Read more
IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service (CMS), a new web service shipped with the 8.4 Platform, is an API (application programming interface) that automatically and securely exposes BI content as a web service for use in operational applications, business process management (BPM) workflows and mashups. With this capability, you now can extend your BI content into existing applications and processes that are critical to your business users as well as add new context by “mashing” content with other applications. Read more
Editor’s Note: This blog was originally posted on February 1, 2010, and has been reviewed/updated on October 5, 2020. Quite some changes have been applied to Framework Manager tool over the past decade, we find that the tuning of determinants is still a valid approach to address issues of sharing dimensions among multi-facts, especially when two fact tables join the dimension tables at different level. For instance, sales goal vs actual sales, with sales goals typically are set at month/quarter level while actual sales are at day level. If it is just one or two measures involved in entire model, you may consider to create alias of dimension tables to join different fact tables at each level or construct custom summary in report itself. Have you implemented in other creative way? We would love to hear your feedback. Read more
If you’ve spent any time administering or configuring an IBM Cognos installation, then you have likely encountered and possibly pondered the feature known as the Cognos Application Firewall (CAF). The name itself seems to attract attention, and we are often asked for additional information about this feature by administrators and information security professionals who work closely with the IBM Cognos platform at their organizations.
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In this month’s Tech Tips we’ll run through a demo on how to display dynamic prompts based on user selection. This is especially useful if you want to offer a lot of functionality in a report without confusing the user with a myriad of unnecessary prompting. Hidden prompts will appear when the user makes specific selections in other prompts.
In last month’s Tips and Tricks we discussed how to standardize a “skin” in each of your different Cognos 8 environments. This allowed all users to receive the same look and feel when interacting with Cognos Connection. We’re going to take it one step further and discuss the benefits of using a built-in tool called the Layout Component Reference to accomplish this at the individual report level.
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.