IBM is winning with Cognos 10.2
Data Warehousing
and BI are offered by a large number of vendors these days. Since W.H. Inmon “father
of data warehousing”, defined data warehouse as: A data warehouse is a Subject
Oriented, Integrated, Non-volatile, and Time-variant collection of data in
support of management’s decisions, there have been several developments in BI
generally. Real-Time BI has become a big issue these days. Big Data is another one.
In your choice for a BI and Data warehouse applications and a comparison of
vendors it is important to know what the goal is for your BI Data Warehouse.
There is first the difference in methodologies, Kimball vs Inmon, is a first point
to look at.
Which Data Warehousing Methodology is best? Which car is best? It depends!
I will
briefly compare the main differences between Kimball and Inmon methodologies:
Feature
|
Kimball
|
Inmon
|
Operational
Data Store (ODS)
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
ETL
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Enterprise
Data Model
|
No
|
Yes
|
Star
Schema Datamarts
|
Yes
|
Yes
[1]
|
Reconciliation
|
No
|
Yes
|
OLAP
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Reporting
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Agile
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
[1]
Inmon’s Corporate Information Factory advocates the user of star schema’s to
build data marts.
Inmon’s
main tenet is that an Enterprise Data Model is required to underpin a Corporate
Data Warehouse and Kimball makes no such claim. In reality, most large
corporates replicate operational table structures and data regularly into an
Operational Data Store (ODS) which is an approximate union of the data models
from each operational system. So in a Kimball shop the ODS
approximates a rough Enterprise Data Model, thereby closing the gap on the
perceived difference. However, Inmon does stress the importance of
reconciling the Data Warehouse back to source, whereas Kimball provides no such
emphasis.
Both
propose Star Schema Datamarts, business driven incremental development
involving prototyping iterations (Agile) and report/query delivery from
relational databases directly or via OLAP data repositories such as
n-dimensional cubes.
Here at
UOW, we utilize our ODS as a rough Enterprise Data Model, we reconcile our
Kimball fact and conformed dimensions as required, and build data marts using
star schemas and n-dimensional cubes, from which data is extracted using Cognos
Bi tools and native SQL.
Below is a comparison of
three vendors, IBM, Oracle and SAP, which compares
Business Intelligence (BI) Express
Software Comparison for IBM Cognos 10 BI by IBM, Hyperion System 9 by Oracle,
SAP Business Objects Edge Business Intelligence by SAP
IBM Cognos 10.2 Enterprise was
announced a short while ago, and with it comes increased usability, performance
and a host of new features. Below we’ll take a walk through a few of these new
features and highlight how they’ll impact your bottom line business.
Cognos Insight 10.2
Cognos Insight, released in
Early 2012, is the Personal Analytics solution that has taken the marketplace
and user’s desktops by storm, garnering a #1 ranking among all Self Service
Business Intelligence Platforms in The Forrester Wave (Q2 2012). Cognos 10.2
continues to improve ease of use, and integration with IBM Cognos Enterprise to
encourage collaboration and enterprise distribution while avoiding data silos
that other competitive solutions can create. What’s the use of personal insight
if the entire organization cannot stand to benefit?
Tree
Maps
Customers and Partners alike have clamored for improved data
visualizations and IBM has responded in kind. The addition of Tree Maps to
Cognos Insight pays homage to the applied data visualization theories of
luminaries such as Edward Tufte and Stephen Few and it is a theme that is quite
prevalent in Cognos 10.2. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for Tree Maps in
the enterprise studios as this is a Cognos Insight-Only feature for now.
Smart Metadata
A new data discovery engine in Cognos Insight will automatically
detect dimensional levels in hierarchies and even differentiate between numeric
attributes and measures. This means users will spend even less time importing
data, further shortening the learning curve of this already intuitive platform.
Drill-able, Drag and Drop Charting and Top/Bottom Filtering
Users can now drill up and down directly on charts, just as is
possible in Cognos Enterprise, and they can also drag and drop dimensions and
measures directly onto charts as opposed to having to retain a crosstab in
prior versions. Also included is rapid top/bottom filtering in Crosstabs that
is always a simple right click away.
Package Import
Prior to this latest release, users could import data into
Cognos Insight from existing IBM Cognos Reports. IBM takes the story of unified
metadata one step further allowing users to source data directly from the same
ad-hoc reporting packages that are published in the Cognos Enterprise
environment. For IT and business alike this means master data management and
data governance from the enterprise to the desktop: unified business logic and
terminology at every step of the way.
Time Rollups
Cognos Insight now has out-of-box functionality to build custom
time dimensions or roll-ups. Populate entire years regardless of how sparse
your data may be or customize it to match your organizations fiscal calendar.
High Fidelity Publish
Customers who also have IBM Cognos TM1 Enterprise can publish
their Cognos Insight dashboards to Cognos 10.2 Enterprise as full-fledged,
tabbed Cognos Workspaces. This means that Cognos Insight users can share their
analyses with other Cognos Enterprise users who do not have Cognos
Insight capabilities. This is huge from both a customer licensing and a
usability perspective as prior releases required that any users who wanted to
view an Insight dashboard must have Cognos Insight capabilities, which came at
the higher Advanced Business Author licensing level. To view a Cognos Workspace
a user need only be at popular Enhanced Consumer license tier.
It seems a little strange to say we’re glad that IBM Cognos 10.2
delivers fewer “insights”, but the renaming of Business Insight and Business
Insight Advanced to Cognos Workspace and Cognos Workspace Advanced
respectively, is a welcome change. Hopefully this will help to ease some of the
confusion that’s arisen in recent years among a myriad of
“insight” labeled components in within the IBM Business Analytics
solution portfolio. Along with this re-branding, come a number of useful new
features.
Multi
Tabbed Workspaces
A major enhancement to Cognos Workspace is the ability to easily
create multi-tab workspaces enabling you to expand your workspace’s visual
footprint without the need to scroll. With tabbed workspaces also comes a new
control known as an Action Button which can be programed to trigger tab
changes.
Freeze and Unfreeze Column and Row Headers
Excel users rejoice, they’ve added the functionality to freeze
and unfreeze crosstab column and row headers while scrolling.
Data Visualization Guide
As mentioned previously, the theme of applied data visualization
theory is a recurring one in Cognos 10.2. The new Visual Recommender in Cognos
Workspace will help you to select the appropriate chart type based on the data
values in your workspace, along with some insightful rationale for that
decision.
Graduated Capabilities
Administrators can now assign graduated capabilities to the
Cognos Workspace tool. Users can have the option of Authoring, Interacting or
just consuming any Cognos Workspace. This is useful in controlling the
available Cognos Workspace feature set for governance purposes, or to even
further simplify the experience to drive adoption in a user population of
diverse skill sets.
Other Features
Cognos workspace 10.2 also brings support for printing and use
in Google Chrome and Safari.
Push Notifications
Cognos Mobile now supports push notifications to the status IOS
status bar in the iPad app – users can now be notified when a new version of
their report is available, further reducing the latency in decision making on
the go.
Improved Performance of Multi-page Reports
Multi-page reports can now be streamed to devices, reducing the
loading time. Users no longer have to wait for the entire report to download
before viewing.
Administrators Can Now Secure Mobile Access
A new mobile capability in Cognos Administration allows
administrators to govern access to Cognos via Mobile devices. This has benefits
from a governance perspective for all organizations that deploy Cognos Mobile,
especially those that employ a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy.
Report Studio
Report Studio, the work-horse
of the IBM Cognos solutions suite, receives a few minor, but high impact
updates in the IBM Cognos 10.2 Enterprise release.
Prompt
API
The new prompt API is a long overdue and welcome update to
Professional Authors and Report Studio hackers everywhere. The API is 100%
documented and supported, and like any good API can be expected to persist
across future product renditions. The API provides a documented method for setting,
reading, deleting and validating prompt values using JavaScript. The API is
supported in Report Studio, Cognos Viewer, Cognos Workspace and Cognos
Workspace Advanced.
Excel Improvements
Expect improved Excel compatibility of Cognos report outputs
with increased spreadsheet maximums to 16,384 columns by 1,048,576 rows. Cognos
10.2 also brings a brand new Excel output format called Excel 2007 Data which
is perfect for lightweight data transfer to Excel without any report
formatting.
Dynamic Cubes
By far the most exciting new feature in Cognos 10.2 is the
addition of a new OLAP technology to the IBM Cognos solution suite which in
conjunction with pre-existing OLAP options provides developers with the option
of the right tool for the job at hand. The Dynamic Cube solution builds upon
existing Dynamic Query Mode (DQM) functionality to close a major gap that
exists in many vendor OLAP offerings: the organization with a large or mature
star or snowflake schema data warehouse that wants to provide an OLAP
experience to their users without sacrificing data details or high
performance.
Here are a few highlights of this new feature:
•
100% In-Memory OLAP Engine for a high-performance, low-latency
user experience.
•
Minimized access to the underlying data warehouse.
•
Security aware caching features.
•
Aggregate awareness to allow query routing to in-memory or
physical aggregate tables in the data warehouse.
•
Aggregate Advisor feature will monitor, recommend new physical
aggregate tables, and even generate SQL/DDL.
•
Uses a new OLAP modeling tool called Cube Designer that should
be intuitive to developers with previous OLAP experience.
•
Multiple cubes can share conformed dimensions.
•
Use of Multi-Pass SQL is easy on data warehouse server resources
and DBA’s alike.
•
80 times faster than similarly modeled dimensionally modeled
relational (DMR) data sources.
Transformer and PowerCube loyalists (ourselves included) can
breathe easy as this new technology is not a signal of their decline. Dynamic
cubes are meant to complement existing OLAP technology and provide developers
with the most appropriate option for every scenario, rather than trying to
force a one-size-fits-all solution.
Architecture and Environment Support
•
Big Data Support: Hadoop / Hive via JDBC Connector
•
SQL Server and Analysis Services 2012
•
Salesforce.com (Native DQM)
•
SAP ECC (R3) (Native DQM)
•
Siebel (Native DQM)
The big news here is native support for Big Data and seamless
integration with IBM InfoSphere BigInsights (Hadoop). Additionally, native
support for a number of ERP vendors has been added to Cognos via Dynamic Query
Mode for increased performance and reduced implementation
complexity. Prior to 10.2, support for data sources such as Saleforce.com,
SAP ECC and Siebel required a connector via Virtual View Manager (VVM). We
should also note that VVM 10.2 will be the final release of this solution, and
while it will continue to be supported, developers should take note that it is
now deprecated in favor of DQM.
100% 64 Bit
These remaining 32 bit components of IBM Cognos 10 get an update
for full 64 bit compatibility: BI Gateway, Metric Studio and Data Manager
Multi-Tenant Support
Cognos 10.2 now supports native multi-tenancy. While this
feature may not have mass appeal, it will be incredibly valuable to certain IBM
Cognos OEM partners as well as organizations that have deployed Cognos in a
federated manner and are looking to more easily segment different business
units or sub-organizations within their shared IBM Cognos platform
architecture.
Content Archiving
Last but not least, Cognos 10.2 now natively supports fully
integrated content archiving to a file system. This feature will be coveted by
organizations that have content retention and audit requirements that are
looking to keep their Cognos content store free from large report outputs to
maximize their environmental performance. This new feature has much of the same
archival functionality that IBM FileNet customers have enjoyed since the 10.1.1
release
In this
webinar you learn why Cognos 10 begins a new series of innovations for business
analytics by expanding traditional business intelligence capabilities. You will
learn how Cognos aligns information and the decision process so you can
collaborate across the organization to turn data into insights.
IBM
Cognos 10: The product vision, Eric
Yau, Harriet Fryman and others explain the motivation and vision driving the
creation of IBM Cognos 10
IBM
Cognos 10.2 Overview:
Business
Analytics Diagnostic Usability Matrix
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/diagnostics/index.html
IBM
Cognos 10.2 New Features Presentations:
The
following topics describe the new features for 10.2.0. 64-bit
IBM Cognos gateway
In earlier versions, if you installed 64-bit
versions of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, only 32-bit versions of the
gateway component were available. In this version, 64-bit versions of the
gateway are also available. You can take advantage of the 64-bit hardware and
the new 64-bit libraries.
Configuration
of multi-tenant applications in IBM Cognos Configuration
You can use new properties in IBM® Cognos®
Configuration to configure Business Intelligence environments supporting
multi-tenant applications.
Predefined
LDAP configurations
In IBM Cognos Configuration, you can configure
your environment by selecting from a number of predefined LDAP authentication
namespace configurations.
Option
to view the status of silent installations on the screen
You can use the -displayLog option to view the
status of the silent installation on the screen.
Option
to initialize Cognos Configuration from a different file
You can use the -startupfile path/filename.xml
option to specify a startup file other than the cogstartup.xml file when
starting the IBM Cognos configuration tool.
Listed
below are features that are new in version 10.2.0 of IBM® Cognos® Business
Intelligence.
Multiple
tenant environments
Multi-tenancy provides the capability to
support multiple customers or organizations (tenants) by using a single
deployment of an application, while ensuring that each tenant can access only
the data that they are authorized to use. Such applications are called
multi-tenant applications. Multi-tenant applications minimize the extra costs
associated with these environments.
Support
for bidirectional languages
The bidirectional features supported by IBM
Cognos Business Intelligence include bidirectional text, digit shaping, and
object direction in reports.
Restricted
access to Cognos Mobile
You can now restrict access to IBM Cognos
Mobile using the Mobile secured function.
Improved
search with field-level search capability
IBM Cognos Connection search delivers more
relevant results, faster.
Excel
2007 Data report output format
The Excel 2007 Data report output format
enables you to generate native Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheets containing
list report data for further manipulation.
This
video contains the introduction and data access strategies.
For
more IBM BA Proven Practices content, please visit
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/analytics/practices.html
Data
Science Central - The Online Resource for Big Data Practitioners
IBM Dev
Ops
IBM
Cognos 10 - Collaborative BI
See a
full product demo using IBM Cognos 10 BI and IBM Lotus Connections here:
http://bit.ly/gOTlg1
The
Boeing Company chooses IBM Cognos 10
Even
the BEST BI cannot prevent manufacturing errors from third party suppliers, but
can help analyze the weak spots. Think of the battery problems from Boeing, IBM
BI certainly can help analyze and pinpoint the issues to look at for you. Just ask
the right questions with your BI solution. Big Data or Data Warehousing IBM
Cognos 10 can help you with IBM DB2 10.5.
Analytics:
the real-world use of big data
This
new study, from the IBM Institute for Business Value in partnership with the
Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, explores how organizations
are leveraging big data to create competitive advantage in the marketplace and
reflects input from more than 1,100 business and IT executives, in 95
countries, combined with executive interviews and case studies.
To
download this study, go to http://www.ibm.com/2012bigdatastudy
IBM
Smarter Analytics tranforms organizations by providing access to all
information, delivering insights to all people, and improving all decisions
(from tactical to operational). Learn more: http://www.ibm.com/SmarterAnalytics
IBM AQ Test
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17sG3xSahEI
Take
test at:
Next Steps:
For more information please contact me at:
Drs. Albert Spijkers
DBA Consulting
web: http://www.dbaconsulting.nl
blog: DBA Consulting blog
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