COGNOS 8.3 Error - Setup cannot continue because an outstanding reboot is required. Please reboot your computer and try again

I haven’t come across this issue but my colleague did; it is such a strange error that even after rebooting the system several times we were getting this error. So I logged into the COGNOS knowledge bank and found the solution.

Basically this issue may occur when trying to reinstall Impromptu or PowerPlay (Series 7) or COGNOS 8.3 on Windows operating system. The setup prompts to reboot the system but rebooting the system several times does not help and we get the error message “Setup cannot continue because a reboot is required.”

So the solution here is:
1. Open Windows Explorer.
2. From the Tools menu, click Folder Options, View, Hidden files and folders radio button.
3. From the Start menu, click Search, All Files or Folders and enter GSUNINSTALL.FLG.
4. Rename the GSUNINSTALL.FLG to GSUNINSTALL.OLD in the local Temp directory.
5. Proceed with the installation.

COGNOS – Using a blob column in this query requires that the query subject ….. must have either a key or a unique index

BLOB is basically an abbreviation for Binary Large OBject. It is a collection of binary data in the database.
The snapshot above shows an error because of the BLOB and one of the main reasons for that error could be a particular field in the DB that is a text field. At least in my case, when I first encountered this issue, it was because of ‘text’ field in the db which is not supported by COGNOS. So the solution for this is to change the text field in the DB into a VarChar.
In one of the metadata queries, we again faced this issue even though we had updated the DB long back. This error started coming when we added new data into one metadata query @ the package level. When I tested the query individually at the import layer; it seems to be working but when I am combining couple of these BLOB VarChar from different metadata queries I was facing this issue again. So I named these same objects differently at the import layer level (on different queries) and joined them @ the package level it seemed to be working.
I am sure that this error had nothing to do with the blob issue but it was still throwing the BLOB error. I would say; always name the metadata with different and specific names so that the system does not get confused when we create relationships.