IBM Cognos 10 Document

8/3/2019 IBM Cognos 10 Document

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IBM Cognos 10 : review & analysis of new functionality

Business Intelligence Unleashed, Expectations Exceeded ?

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 been acquired 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.

User interface targeted at business users

Since the early days of business intelligence, much has changed. Not only has the amount of available

data exploded, but technology matured and business users have become far more proficient at using

BI technology. This leads to new opportunities where users can be provided with the freedom on how

to present the data they need, whilst IT is maintains the standards in security, performance and

reliability centrally. When looking at the renewed product offering with IBM Cognos 10, the theme

ofself-servicing BI is considered to be the main plotline. IBM Cognos 10 features a completely new

user experience by offering a unified BI workspace: Business Insight. Although marketed as a new

product, Business Insight was already known as Cognos Go! Dashboard.

With this release it is no longer a separate product but now an integral part of IBM Cognos 10.

The Business Insight workspace is built by dragging/dropping complete reports or parts of a report

onto the canvas. Charts, crosstabs, metric objects, TM1 objects everything can be included.

Additionally filters can be added that will filter seamlessly all associated objects. Two types of filters

are available: value filters using checkboxes and slider filters to filter on date.

Figure 1 : The Business Insight canvas

click to enlarge

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
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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-servicingBusiness Intelligence experience by leveraging existing content and easily creating new content.

Enhanced searching and collaboration

IBM Cognos 10 offers integrated search capabilities that will search both the content of a report as

well as the metadata behind the report. By doing a refined search, even selections on specific object

types are possible. In Cognos 8, these search capabilities were part of Cognos Go! Search. This product

has now been added to the base product, requiring no extra license cost. Also added by IBM are a

number ofcollaboration capabilities. According to IBM, this will offer faster and better decisions. To

achieve this, Lotus Connectionsfully has 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 auser 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

click to enlarge

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, NokiaSymbian, 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

mobile device. IBM Cognos 10 Mobile also is location aware, so values can be filtered based on GPS

coordinates.


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Figure 3 : Cognos Mobile

click to enlarge

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.

Figure 4 : Active Report Dashboard

click to enlarge

Enhanced reporting capabilities

With the acquisition ofSPSS by IBM in 2009, it was only a matter of time before these capabilities

would be integrated in Cognos. Report Studio now offers a new report type: Statistics. By means of

a wizard driven interface, it is possible to create reports with descriptive statistics, histograms,

boxplots and Q-Q plots (for more details, see below). At the backend, the Statistics service is

running the SPSS Statistics engine. By integrating these features, statistical process control can now

be embraced and for example, Six-Sigma projects can leverage the existing Cognos-platform.

New features include:

Descriptive statistics: will quantitatively summarize a dataset such as mean, standard

deviation, minimum, maximum

Histograms: display a range of variable values in intervals of equal length such as a frequency

of incidents over a range of months
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Boxplot: is also known as a box and whisker chart and shows groups of numeric data. In the

chart, minimum, maximum, median, upper and lower quartiles, outlying and extreme values.

Figure 5 : Boxplot

click to enlarge

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

click to enlarge

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 atdesign 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.

Figure 7 : Bullet chart

click to enlarge

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:
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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 layer 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.

Using external data

The use of external data within a Report Studio report allows users to leverage data not present in the

data warehouse or centrally managed data sources. This allows users to act upon data much faster

than before when external data files first had to be made available in the data warehouse or in a

Transformer cube.

Excel, tab-delimited text files, csv-files and XML-data files can be imported as external data. The

external data is not report specific. When external data is imported, a new package is created,

containing both data and relationships between the objects. To prevent some users to tamper with

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 using a similar mechanism.

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


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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 SourceSafethough it remains possible to use an external repository control.

Under the hood

IBM Cognos 10 presents some remarkable performance gains: MDX queries could run up to three times

faster, PDF generation is 40% faster These gains are realized through the use of the dynamic query

mode. With ever increasing query complexity and growing data volumes, Cognos created a JAVA-based

optimization application that will optimize queries by using 2 separate mechanisms: key optimization

and in-memory caching.

Key optimization is used for OLAP data providers such as IBM Cognos TM1, Oracle Hyperion Essbase

and SAP BW. It uses a number of optimizations:

Direct Java Connectivity is supported for SAP BW and Oracle Hyperion Essbase

Null Suppression optimization: when levels are added to a report, the number of cells needed

grow exponentially. A lot of these cells contain null values, slowing down the report evaluation

process. By leaving out those cells, the report performance is enhanced. This feature is

available in Business Insight Advanced, Query Studio and Report Studio.

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 anddata 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


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click to enlarge

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.

Figure 9 : Scheduled activity breakdown

click to enlarge

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.

Figure 10 : Server Scorecard view

click to enlarge

Migrating from older versions

The last topic of this insight, discusses the inevitable migration process from previous releases. The

Cognos 8 Upgrade Manager was face lifted and renamed to Cognos Lifecycle Manager. This tool

enables the automated migration of Cognos 8 reports to IBM Cognos 10 in a visual and easy manner.

Migration to IBM Cognos 10 can be done from any Cognos 8 release and this is the last release that willsupport ReportNet as a source system.

The Lifecycle Manager tool is a tool that automates the validation, executing side by side and finally

comparing the report output. When creating a project in Lifecycle manager, the source and target

environment are defined. Next, the application credentials to log on both content stores are defined

and the list of content to be included in the project is added. The first step in the actual migration

process is to manually deploy all the content from the source to the target environment with an

identical folder structure. When this is done, Lifecycle Manager can be used to validate all the objects
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in the target environment. Before Lifecycle Manager can programmatically execute the reports,

prompts must be supplied. If prompts are defined and saved in Cognos Connection, Lifecycle Manager

will automatically include these in the migration project. If no prompts are defined, Lifecycle Manager

allows for automatic generation. When all prompts are entered, the reports are run in both the source

and target environment. Next the reports can be compared by Lifecycle Manager. When the outputs do

not match, a blinking option is available, so the developer can quickly visually asses where the

differences are located. If there is a real difference, the report can be rejected by the user.

Figure 11 : LifeCycle Manager interface

click to enlarge

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 to digest 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.

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