Envisn's IBM Cognos Blog

April  2019, by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

Most institutional data used for reporting purposes comes from one or more data warehouses which are typically aggregations of internal transaction systems like SAP, Oracle, etc. But more frequently today an equally large portion comes from external sources. This could be vendors/ suppliers, government sources, customers, etc. In fact, this segment of data is typically growing at a much faster rate than internal sources as companies need for this data becomes critical to just in time supply chain management as well as quality control.

March  2019, by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

Triggers are widely used across many Cognos environments, particularly larger ones where reports are often scheduled based on one or more dependent events being completed. These events are typically things external to Cognos but required by it to complete a scheduled event. An example would be to run reports based on the successful update of the data warehouse. If the reports were simply run on a time schedule it’s possible that the reports could kick off before the data warehouse update was completed rendering the reports useless and requiring a rerun. Tying report execution to a successful update of the data warehouse insures that they will only be run once for a given cycle.

December  2018, by Elwood Philbrick, Envisn, Inc.

In this second part of this blog subject we are going to focus on some less traditional areas of impact analysis in Cognos Analytics but no less important. These are:

• Object dependency
• Data lineage
• Object failure history

October 2018, by Elwood Philbrick, Envisn, Inc.

Administering Cognos Analytics is mostly about managing change. Changes to reports, packages, models, security, triggers, schedules, etc. are ongoing. Doing this successfully requires being able to accurately understand how planned changes will impact the objects in your Content Store. Knowing the precise impact of planned changes is critical because if you don’t get this right the change process can be painful. Because objects requiring change are not identified or objects are incorrectly identified as needing change. Fixing them is difficult because you may not even know what’s been changed.

August 27, 2018, by Elwood Philbrick, Envisn, Inc.

Previous blogs in this Cognos Metadata series focused capturing the metadata, the need to persist it and how to use it. Here we’ll be focusing on metadata drivers and how they are changing.

June 29, 2018, by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

One of the goals we set at the beginning of this blog series on Cognos metadata was to access all of it and to be able to use all of it to answer virtually any question anyone would ever have about their Cognos environment(s). In support of this it became almost inevitable that at some point we would be called to do this. Not just once, but multiple times.

April 30, 2018 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

One of the ongoing major tasks in any Cognos environment is the need to manage change. Changes to ERP systems, databases, data sources, etc. occur on a regular basis. This requires changes to FM Models, packages, reports, queries, etc. Ideally you get notified of these well in advance of the actual change so they can be addressed in a planful way. But sometimes the change has already occurred and you need to fix things.

March 29, 2018 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

No other area within Cognos is opaque as security. Within the application itself it’s difficult or impossible to get even the most basic questions answered without a lot of painful, tedious work. Even then, trying to answer the same question again involves the same amount of work, and sometimes even more. Basic questions such as:

• What is the security profile for Melissa Smith?
• Which accounts have access to the folder Accounts Receivable?
• What are the account memberships of all of the Cognos Groups and Roles?
• How can we easily validate that our Security Model is being correctly applied?
• Which objects in our Content Store have overridden security?
• Do we have a record of all security changes being made? Particularly those involving sensitive data?

February 28, 2018 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

In the first couple of blogs in this subject series we covered the major elements of the Cognos metadata universe and how to harness them for use. And one of our goals was to be able to access metadata from any of the four major groups and be able to link when appropriate with data from any other group. This is possible because we have all of the metadata from the groups in an XML database which is a virtual image of the Cognos Content Store.

January 30, 2018 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

In the first blog in this series published last month we presented the four key data groups in the Cognos Metadata Universe and described them in some detail. These are shown again on the left side of Figure 1 below. In that blog we also listed some of the things we would cover in subsequent blogs. One of these was the importance of having an architecture to deal with Cognos metadata.

Having a data architecture begins with the desired outcome of the process. Which is the answer to the question of how we want to use the data.