Envisn's IBM Cognos Blog

March 29, 2013 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.
Confused by all of the headlines you see about Big Data? You’re not alone. Big Data is probably the most over-hyped term in the technology world since Client Server came on the scene decades ago. In reality Big Data is mostly the same data you already know supplemented by the surge in new ways of collecting data that did not exist until recently. Cars, GPS, mobile devices, online shopping and social media are some major examples – and they’re growing fast. What seems to be missing for many of us is a context with which to try and assimilate what all of this means and how to deal with it.

What’s Different about Big Data?

There is no consensus around the definition of Big Data and many believe that trying to reach one is irrelevant. That said, there are some attributes that characterize the new face of data in this networked world. These include:

February 27, 2013 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.
IBM has managed to successfully integrate Cognos into the fold, maintaining and improving its position in the BI market while leveraging the Cognos acquisition into a broader position in the expanding analytics market as Big Data overtakes this space in terms of hype if not reality. One measure of this success is the annual report card on the BI market that Gartner puts out and is referred to as the Gartner "Magic Quadrant”. This is a simple and effective way to measure a broad range of players, their role in the market and how they rank relative to other players. Expanded this year to include analytics along with BI, the latest iteration of the Gartner report for 2013 is shown below.

Jan. 29, 2013, by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.
The Business Intelligence market and Analytics are converging on the crest of the Big Data wave. Some of the major trends behind this are better tools and a significant increase in the data flow for all organizations. The big things here are:

Hadoop

Hadoop is an open-source framework for data applications on very large hardware clusters. Gartner Group is predicting that within the next two years nearly two-thirds of analytics packages will feature the Hadoop framework for handling massive datasets. IBM is a major supporter of this as evidenced by the many examples shown during the recent IOD 2012 in Las Vegas. It has made possible the processing of non-traditional, unstructured data in the form of text, social network data, machine data, etc. This is a big deal because unless you can harness Big Data and put it on a common plane nothing else matters. Look for application providers to strengthen and extend this framework wherever possible because of the competitive advantage it provides. And since Hadoop is open-source, its lower relative cost is a major driver to broad adoption with the only limitation the supply of technical talent to implement it.

Dec. 20, 2012, by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.
The single biggest issue for many Cognos administrators is the out-of-control growth of their Cognos Content Store. This usually happens after the environment has been operational for a while but it’s worth knowing what is assumed to be behind the growth of the Content Store.

Sizing Metrics

There are a number of factors that IBM Cognos recommends using for sizing the Cognos Content Store. These include:

Nov. 29, 2012, By Elwood Philbrick, Envisn, Inc.
Those attending the recent IBM Information on Demand event in Las Vegas looking for a big splash by Cognos were likely disappointed. Cognos 10 was introduced two years ago with a lot of fanfare and what they’ve done with its latest iteration, release of Cognos 10.2, is to continue to refine, extend and integrate. The major goal of this release was in making it easier to use the products. Nothing big or dramatic, just many new additions and extensions that enable a broader range of differently skilled users to utilize BI analytics to work more productively.

This is not to diminish what’s new in Cognos 10.2 because many of these new features make it possible for users to get the meaning from data much faster and with greater insight than ever before. For example, users that struggle to find the best chart to use with their data will find the chart wizard analyzes the data in use and recommends a chart to be used. This seems to work well especially for users new to the graphical representation of data.

Oct. 31, 2012, By Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.
At IOD in Las Vegas last week the session titled “Making the Move to Dynamic Query” more than half the 200 attendees came expecting to learn about the migration path for users of Power Cubes (PowerPlay) to Cognos Dynamic Cubes. This became obvious in the first few minutes of that session by the questions that were asked. IBM Cognos does not see Dynamic Cubes as the evolution of Power Cubes. They see Dynamic Cubes filling a different market need.

Different Market

Dynamic Cubes is an extension of Dynamic Query Mode that was introduced two years ago at IOD in 2010. They work by leveraging substantial in-memory data assets as well as data aggregations to achieve high performance interactive analysis and reporting over terabytes of warehouse data. In fact, most of the examples cited in this presentation focused on their role as a fast-feeder data source for reports and queries involving large amounts of data. A key requirement is that the warehouse data needs to be structured in a star or snowflake schema in order for this to work.

Sept. 28, 2012, By Elwood Philbrick, Envisn, Inc.
On any listing of topics related to Cognos BI, security is almost always at or near the top. This subject area consumes more time and effort of administrators than anything else. Part of this stems from the lack of transparency on security within Cognos BI itself. So to make your life easier, here are some things you want to avoid in the administration of Cognos security:

1. Don’t administer Cognos security without an effective security model. Ideally your Cognos security model is able to leverage the external security model in use within your organization. But beyond that, you need a model of how you map your organization’s members into your Groups and Roles. This is the single most important factor in creating an effective Cognos security model since it is used to define permissions to Cognos Content Store objects and features available to BI users.
2. Don’t confuse groups and roles in the Cognos namespace. Groups and roles in the Cognos namespace behave almost identically. The difference is that groups can contain only accounts and other groups, while roles can contain accounts, groups and other roles. Creating multiple groups in a role can easily get complicated very quickly, but it may make sense if you use the role for broad access control and the groups for limited access. A simpler approach would be to use roles to control access to capabilities and groups to manage access to content.
3. Don’t over-apply security in Cognos BI. The goal is to secure sensitive data from unwarranted access while providing the necessary data to authorized Cognos BI users.
4. Don’t combine the purposes of content security and feature permissions. Use one set of groups or roles to control access to content and another set to control access to features (Query Studio, Report Studio, etc.).
5. Don’t give groups or roles names that have no obvious meaning. Using clear, simple names that denote its members or function will help insure that it is used consistently across the enterprise. Remember, names used need to survive their creator’s presence.
6. Don’t think it will get simpler over time. Many security models fail because what may have started out to be a consistent approach to accounts, groups and roles became compromised and inconsistent over time. This happens because of changing organizational needs, untrained administrators and simple mistakes. Simply stated, it has outlived its usefulness.

Many organizations find that their Cognos BI security has gotten so complex and unwieldy over time that the only option for them is to start over. While on the face of it this may sound attractive, some of the challenges of mapping existing content, members, etc. into a new model (let alone creating one) may prove to be daunting. Still, for some, not moving to a new security model and structure is not an option. But it’s not an easy task especially without tools that can help you understand how your current security is implemented.

August 29, 2012, By Rick Ryan - Envisn, Inc.
With the release of version 10.1.1 IBM Cognos announced the ability to archive Cognos content. Up to this point the only option has been to retain content in the Cognos Content Store if it was still needed.

Finally Here

Cognos administrators have long wanted the ability to archive Cognos content based on retention rules such as date, content type, etc. And just to be clear, here we’re talking about what is generally referred to as “saved output”, that is, the actual results of reports run at a given time or for periods in the past. In many large Cognos environments it’s not uncommon to see the physical size of saved output greatly exceed that of packages, reports, queries and the rest of the objects in the Cognos Content Store. And since there are statutory requirements for retaining reports for specified periods, this is a real need.

July 31, 2012, By Elwood Philbrick - Envisn, Inc.
This blog article is focused on some of the key things you need to know in order to effectively manage Cognos BI.

June 29, 2012 by Rick Ryan - Envisn, Inc.
At some point in the not too distant future we may well look back on this period as the golden age of business intelligence. BI is universally accepted as having value when it’s implemented successfully and used by people that know how to apply information effectively. Its challenge going forward is to get greater value from the ballooning levels of data in non-traditional segments. Some things to look for from IBM Cognos going forward will be: