Maarten Vanleenhove
Introduction
Early November 2010, IBM Cognos 10 was finally released. "Business Intelligence Unleashed was the as usual- catchy and (overly ?) promising marketing slogan. Expectations were rather high as this was the first major release since Cognos had beenacquired by IBM in 2007. Currently part of the IBM Business Analytics software offering, IBM Cognos 10 offers a lot of enhancements compared to the previous version. This insight tries to shed light on the highlights of this new release and investigates whether expectations have been met or even exceeded.
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Figure 1: The Business Insight canvas Importing objects is done by selecting reports or by selecting a part of a report from the content pane, which shows the content of the content store. Drilling and drill through definitions of the original report are kept in the imported version. By means of an on demand toolbar, changes can be made to the content or layout of the report. Lists can be switched to charts, columns can be added, highlights can be set Each report on the canvas is represented as a widget that is kept internally in the content store. This allows a user to thoroughly modify the content or layout of an object without modifying the original object. These modifications can be done in 2 modes. The simple modifications such as switching from table to chart can be done from within the on demand toolbar. For more advanced modifications a new studio has been developed: Business Insight Advanced. This studio is aimed specifically at business users and is positioned between Query Studio and Report Studio. Business Insight Advanced specifically replaces the Report Studio Express mode. As with Query Studio, data is previewed while developing a report. However more formatting/data presentation options are available then in Query studio. Business Insight offers a common workspace for all supported analytics. This moves the user experience from a role centered approach to a progressively interactive and dynamic self-servicing Business Intelligence experience by leveraging existing content and easily creating new content.
are a number of collaboration capabilities. According to IBM, this will offer faster and better decisions. To achieve this, Lotus Connections has fully become part of IBM Cognos 10 and allows users to consume BI content and discuss it with others through a common interface. This social software allows users to set up due dates, activity owners, discussion threads, wikis, blogs, communities . By using an Inbox a user is notified of new tasks, approval requests and notification requests which the user can act upon. More importantly, users can finally create annotations in reports and dashboards. Annotations can be entered on 2 levels: cell and object level. The entire thread, including who posted what annotation when, is available to the user. When exporting a document to Excel or PDF, the annotations are exported as end notes.
Figure 2: Annotation thread IBM Cognos 10 offers improved data lineage functionalities. Report and model information can be viewed with IBM Cognos Lineage Viewer. With the integration of IBM Infosphere Metadata Workbench it is now possible to look at ETL, source data and impact analysis information.
Smartphones
Cognos Mobile features the ability to access Cognos from a mobile device. While Cognos Mobile 8 used to be limited to Blackberry, IBM Cognos 10 allows for any Windows Mobile system, Nokia Symbian, iPad, iPhone or Blackberry device to be used. The product allows users to fully view and interact with all relevant BI content such as Business Insight dashboards, reports, metrics and analysis in a secure environment. Users can get a real-time view of Cognos BI data, including real-time alerts or perform drill up and down and use improved prompting capabilities while running a report on their
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mobile device. IBM Cognos 10 Mobile also is location aware, so values can be filtered based on GPS coordinates.
Offline reports
Viewing offline content used to be a feature within Cognos but was dropped when launching the new ReportNet architecture back in 2004. For years, existing and long-standing Cognos customers and end-users have requested this feature to become available again, especially as the main competing products offer such capability. Active Reports offer interactive dashboards that business users can use offline. Active Reports are an extension of normal Report Studio reports and can be scheduled or bursted through Cognos Connection. Existing Report Studio reports can easily be converted to Active Reports by adding active report controls and active report variables. A report can be run as HTML or be saved as MHT file. This file is viewable in Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Due to the very flexible nature and the ability to burst and apply row-level security, it is not unlikely that this format will soon replace a lot of the PDF burst reports that were traditionally sent to for example customers or business partners.
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Figure 5: Boxplot Q-Q Plot: a quartile-quartile plot charts the quartiles of a variables distribution against a distribution of your choice, including the normal distribution.
Figure 6 : Q-Q plot Report Studio is now using a new chart engine for any new chart created. Legacy charts can be converted to the new charting engine, or they can be used in legacy mode. The new charting engine will allow setting more properties to modify the appearance, and will give a preview of the chart at design time. Pie Charts for example can now group the smallest slices into a single category, preventing pie charts to become overly busy with small slices. Only one new chart type is available in Cognos 10: the Bullet chart. A bullet chart will compare the actual to the targeted measure.
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Figure 7: Bullet chart It should be noted that Cognos 8.4 already included Marimekko and Micro-charts. Marimekko charts will show a 100% stacked chart, with the width of column being proportional to the total of the column value. Microcharts are a miniature version of line and bar charts and are ideal to be used in a table. Another small but convenient change in Report Studio is the naming of output files. When a report was run in Excel or PDF, the report name used to be a random string. IBM Cognos 10 will now use the report name as the default name when the report is saved. Other user interface related improvements include: Insertable Objects and Properties can now be positioned to the right of the work area Reports can be previewed when opening or saving a report When drilling up / down: the column title can now show the level label value Calculations have been made easier The default report style can be used as a new color scheme Alternative text can be added to non-text objects. In case the reader would not be able to show the object, this alternative text is shown. Using Map Manager, new region layers can now be created. Each new region is made up of one or more regions from the original map.
Another small improvement is the scheduling of reports during a certain period of the day. You can now schedule a report to run hourly between eg. 9 am and 5 pm. It is also possible to change the owner credentials for a schedule or suspend a scheduled activity.
data, the administrators can grant or deny the Allow External Data grant. When the data is imported into the package, it is shareable with other users in a secured manner.
Business Warehouse
SAP BW packages can now be directly created in Cognos Connection. It remains possible however to create and publish SAP BW packages using Framework Manager. When creating a new SAP BW data source, a user friendly and easy wizard is available, that is capable of leveraging the SAP BW security. Also new, is the support for Microsoft Analysis Services 2008 use a similar mechanism. Rare laatste zin
Microsoft Office
IBM Cognos 10 heavily integrates with the Microsoft Office product family. Within Microsoft Excel, the user can connect to the Content Store and select a package on which data analysis will be performed. The actual analysis is created by dragging and dropping package items from the folders into Microsoft Excel. The use of the framework semantic layer ensures stability and security over direct access to the data source. A new feature is that the analysis can be saved in the content store, directly in Excel-format. While it is possible to create your own analysis in Microsoft Excel, you are not required to do so. Within Word/PowerPoint and Excel, the Cognos Content Store can be viewed and objects such as reports or analysis can be imported directly using the Cognos security model. When a report is imported, the data link is saved so the report content can be refreshed when reconnecting to Cognos.
Metadata
Framework Manager largely remains the same. Noteworthy is the Model Design Accelerator. This is a graphical tool that allows you to map tables on facts/dimensions and from there on easily generate a framework model. When the model has been generated, a 3-layered framework model has been built, containing a Physical, Business and Presentation View. In older Framework Manager versions, it was a best practice to use a design language that was not used by business users. This design language was usually a dialect of a main language such as English Zimbabwe. This ensured durable models by preventing compromising the report integrity when attribute names were changed in the model. With this new release, a new property: Use Design Locale for Reference ID has formalized this best practice. What is no longer available is the native support for repository control such as Visual SourceSafe though it remains possible to use an external repository control.
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Master-detail optimization: master queries are pushed to the detail level, leaving only one query that is executed in the database. 64 bit optimization: allows more caching to occur as the Java Virtual machine is no longer limited to the 2GB memory boundary in the memory address space
When a report is built or run, several requests are made to the report service, returning metadata and data to the report. In-memory caching will cache all that data for future reuse. When a user requests the same report once more, the data no longer needs to be retrieved from the data source. There are however a few "buts: the cache is both data-source and user specific, diminishing the effect of the caching. As data is cached, changed data at the database is not captured, so care is required in setting cache refresh rates. In order to be able to easily search for bottlenecks in queries, a new client based tool is delivered: Dynamic Query Analyzer. This tool provides a tree based view on the query and indicates possible bottlenecks using color coding. The Dynamic Query Mode must be configured to log the run trees. This is done by modifying the appropriate Query Service Setting. The resulting logs are written in the /XQELogs/ and can be viewed directly or remotely (HTTP) with the Dynamic Query Analyzer tool.
Figure 8: Dynamic Query Analyzer Interesting to know is that IBM Cognos 10 can be installed with or without a preinstalled content database. When you choose to install a preconfigured database, IBM DB2 is installed.
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Figure 9: Scheduled activity breakdown Several small improvements were finally made to the administration interface. One of them is the ability to graphically look at the schedule load by timeslot as seen in the image above. Another improvement includes the scorecard type view of the server topology indicating availability of servers and services.
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Conclusion
In the past 5 years, IBM has invested US$ 14 billion in the acquisition of 24 software companies. With Cognos being one of them, the overall offering starts to clearly benefit from some of these new technologies. Following the consolidation in the Business Intelligence market a few years back, when IBM acquired Cognos and SAP acquired Business Objects, Cognos clearly seems todigest well the transition into the IBM family. Not only were integration issues tackled, but this release also delivers a series of enhancements, even if some of them originated from innovative, original approaches of smaller challengers in the BI space. However, all in all, one can say that IBM Cognos 10 offers an extremely complete, mature, enterprise BI solution, built from the ground up on a SOA Architecture, and clearly sets a new standard for end-to-end performance management solutions.
For more insights & research on IBM Cognos 10 visit the Knowledgebase at www.element61.be
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