Arul's.TEG Blog

This article describes techniques and options to consider when designing Framework Manager packages, beyond the documented durable model best practices, for maximum usability and user adoption. Key to these techniques is to know the end users: how they approach getting the data and how they will use the data. Dashboards should provide quick access to the relevant information that a User needs. We need to determine how to communicate the quantitative business data effectively in the form of graphs, consolidated and arranged on a single screen so that it can be monitored at a glance. High level durable model best practice refresh – 3 Layer example: 1. Architecting the Data Layer (also called the Physical or Database Layer) is mostly determined by the underlying data warehouse structure, with occasional role playing dimensions. 2.    The Model Layer (also called Working or Business Layer) is mostly determined by the general business relationships between data warehouse tables. A...

Describes the procedure to make content from a previous IBM Cognos release (8.4 for example) available within the IBM Cognos 10 portal. Also known as multi-version coexistence Answer Cognos 10 Multi-Version Coexistence is supported with Cognos 8.3.x, 8.4.x and 8.4.1. While Cognos 8.4.1 requires no updater, one may be required for Cognos 8.3.x and 8.4.x. Below are the minimum build numbers required for these versions. These can be found and confirmed in the cmplst.txt file. IBM Cognos 8.3.86.1045 IBM Cognos 8.4.29.1331 Implementation Details: In your IBM Cognos 10 portal: 1) Go to the Launch->IBM Cognos Administration page 2) Under the Status tab, click the System link 3) In the scorecard pane, click the triangle next to the System entry and choose Set Properties 4) Click on the Settings tab. 5) Click the Edit link under the Environment->Advanced Settings row 6) Add the following two advanced variables and their corresponding values: Variable: MVC_remoteWe...

1. Is there anything special that a network printer needs to have done to it so that you can print to it? - as long as you can print to the printer outside of Cognos environment, then you can also set it up in Cognos Connection to print. Cognos just sends the request to the printer driver on your OS and it is the printer driver that actually communicates with the printer. One thing to remember is that the account which you use to run Cognos 8 service should also have permission to print to the printer. Reference: Installation and Configuration Guide (p.85) The account under which Cognos 8 runs must have access to all required resources, such as printers and Web servers. For example, on Windows, to print reports using a network printer, the account must already have access to the network printer, or you must assign a logon account to the Cognos 8 service. You can configure the Cognos 8 service to use a special user account by selecting the Cognos 8 service from the...

Mapping Excel column types to Framework Manager data types. Resolving the problem Excel does not have ‘data types’ as a RDBMS does. Excel has ‘column types’ which are defined automatically by Excel depending on the data which is stored within the column. The column data types that are returned from Excel for an Excel data source are not identical in all cases to the data types in most programming languages and applications – Framework Manager included. Below is a summary of Excel metadata ‘data types’ and what to expect in Framework Manager. (Excel 2003 –> Framework Manager) Numeric -> Float64 Currency -> Int16 Date/Time -> Date Time Boolean -> Int16 Text<255 -> Char length 16 Memo -> Text Blob Please note that before you can import Excel metadata, you must define a table within Excel Excel 2003: 1. highlight the section of your Excel sheet that you want to import into Framework Manager 2. in Excel, select INSERT > NAME > DEFINE…. 3. cho...

Reports with Master/Detail relationships failed after the Teradata was upgraded from version 12 to version 13. The reports fail with the following error.   Symptom "An error occurred while performing operation 'sqlPrepareWithOptions' status='-239'. UDA-SQL-0460 A general exception has occurred during local processing.UDA-EE-0036 The operator must be an expression, not "".   Resolving the problem Backup and edit the original cognos/c8/bin/cogdmod_td.ini file and insert the following line at the bottom: [DRIVER:TDATA32.DLL VERSION:13.00] SQL_API_SQLDESCRIBEPARAM="FALSE" Save and restart the cognos service(s) If multi-server install, then add the above line to all Dispatcher Machines as well and restart. Note: This is also true of Teradata 13.10. The Driver version number mus...

From configuration UI, hold CTRL+F3 to bring up system properties which contains JAVA details including installation path and JRE version that has been used by current instance of Cognos. Resolving the problem CTRL+F3 to bring up system properties to check JRE version and installation path

What are the minimum services required in a Content Manager only installation of Cognos Business Intelligence? Answer The Cognos Manager can be configured to perform minimal tasks; this may be helpful in high usage 32bit environments. 32bit Cognos is limited to the 2GB user mode memory space, therefore it is important to keep the java virtual memory usage on the content manager as low as possible by reducing java heap usage. In Cognos 8.3 and 8.4, a Content Manager only instance requires: -Content Manager Service -Event Service -Monitor Service * In Cognos 8.4.1, a Content Manager only instance requires: -Content Manager Service -Monitor Service * In Cognos 10 the reliance on an out-of-heap JNI process for authentication was removed therefore there is less of a requirement to reduce the Content Manager services. *this assumes that the remaining services will be enabled on the other instances in a multi-instance environment.