Let's start with some basics:
First there was Cognos7 with powerful client OLAP and iffy impromptu. The catalogue was the equivalent to the universe.
Then came Reportnet as an in-between phase.
With Cognos8 OLAP was transferred straight from the 7 version , but all other things changed.
The catalogue was replaced by framework (manager) that allows for some serious modelling that goes far beyond what BO offers with a universe. When done right it allows you to create a platform independant metadata layer.
The downside is the time it takes to develop.
The magic word in C8 modelling is the star. Get your modelling right and you'll have a potent metadata layer. Get it less than ideal and be prepared to suffer.
Cognos manages to deal with multiple RDBMS at the expense of transparency. All report SQL is first generated as a Cognos version and compiled on the C8 server to the native RDBMS SQL. This makes it pretty hard to take a quick peak at the SQL behind a report to check things.
The C8 main tooling comes in 3 flavors:
Report Studio
Webbased advanced reporting that offers tremendous value in terms of layout,conditional variables, prompting. It is very much more a tool for the developer than the old full client BO reporter. It shines when you want all the functionality you can think of. Being used to creating complex BO full client reports I was really shocked to find I could spend days to build something that would require a few hours in BO. The trick is that you're directly building in memory instead of using a client, which means rerunning the report again and again (version 8.3 will rectify this partly)
There are a few very strong elements to mention:
· use conditional variables for layout ( a la alerters) and for hiding/displaying parts of the report
· building great prompt pages with out-of-the box cascading prompts and such
· Good options to display as pdf / Excel
· Loads of out-of-the box report objects including tables,repeaters,conditional blocks etc
And some bad ones:
· Quite unstable in the earlier 8 versions
· Development time
· Multiquery no problem, but a report can just have one package as source (which relates to one universe, whereas in BO you could use synchronized dataproviders.
Query Studio
Enduser reporting for creating simple lists.
Offers too little value and is used sparsely (at least that’s my experience)
Analysis Studio
Allows you to use Cognos Powercubes or DMR data (dimensionally modeled data). Powerful and very stable. Aimed at the data analyst, not for management reporting
Cognos does not seem to allow experts to develop reference-books. A good source is the Knowledge base, but you need to have proper access.
A dedicated site:
If you want to contact me directly you need to google my name combined with:
"the mountain where Tom Simpson died" (not the entire string, just the name of the mountain
)
cause that's how old contacts seem to trace me..
Ties Blom
