Second COGNOS Conference Successfully !!!!!!

Successfully made it to the second year of COGNOS conference at Hyatt Residency, Boston. The day was pretty interesting from driving all the way from Westborough to Cambridge which took me one hour and ten minutes with all the traffic and the rain pouring badly.

Started with the Key Note presentation where the concentration was majorly on the new COGNOS iPhone app and the COGNOS integration with SAP. They were also showing COGNOS Express and COGNOS Go Dashboard which were already shown in the previous conference.

The first session I sat was the Report/ Dashboards and Scorecards. There was only one report that really impressed me. All the other stuff that they were demoing where the regular ones.

The second session was the COGNOS Express Manager – Integration of excel sheet with IBM COGNOS. The new feature they showed was the updation of the data from the excel creates immediate effect on the reports that are generated from the excel sheet. The COGNOS Express had some good featuers like the Scorecards (which have interesting features like the charts with default values and calculator, just like a computer app.) and COGNOS Configuration and Log files and ODBC and Users list; are all added to the Xccelator GUI at the Home level. Ifelt it is a Fantastic approach, especially to the install team at my company who can have much faster and easier way to update clients. So the installation and configuration will just a click away.

Third session --- experience of COGNOS USER. Big client with 85 million records who use Teradata. Not the best of presentations but was OK. They seem to be using the cubes rather the live DB due to their humungous data. This session also spoke about how important is it to maintain global standards and documentation, centralization of things.Fourth and the final session – balanced scorecard methodology… I have no clue and I need to ready about it. Case study about Eneco (GATNER) . This was more about Metric Studio.The most funny part was that, in each of the presentation they had the same dashboard and everyone was explaining it in their own way. It actually shows us that how we can interpret one single report into so many ways.

After seeing all these people presenting on the stage… I strongly believe I can give a better presentation of COGNOS .

From query studio to a pdf link from the right click property called Glossary

Apache and IIS as default webserver and not Web Sphere.

The default DB which comes with COGNOS is Informix and Not DB2.

COGNOS 8.3 Query Studio report must update Error

The above image actually shows 2 different errors. The first error asks you to update to the newer package that was published (This usually occurs when the query studio is open and a newer publish has been published during that time period.) During which we usually, log out of query studio and log in again. But here, we could not even do that and when we click on ‘OK’ it took us to the second error ‘Failed to load the pluggable shared library’.
The error that COGNOS is throwing and the actual issue are completely different according to me. The issue here was that, ‘Guarantor Name’ metadata in the development layer had a different spelling than what it was before and so the Presentation layer was not able to retrieve the metadata from the development layer. Once I ran the query subject in the framework to test, it through an error which clearly identified that the development layer did not have the metadata which the query was looking for.
The solution here was that I had to update the development query with the right path for each of the metadata elements in that query subject.

COGNOS 8.3 – sqlpreparewithoptions status = -17 Error

I have seen this issue couple of times on the machine where there are too many users or at places where the DB is massive. My general solution to this issue is to restart COGNOS services every night (setting up a scheduled job) or weekly once. If this does not work then try the alternative solution.
The alternative steps that I do follow are:
1. Go to task manager, look for Derby.exe under the process and end the process.
2. Go to COGNOS/c8/bin and delete all the *.dmp files. (DMP – Are basically memory / error dump files)
3. Increase the memory size in the COGNOS Configuration.
4. Restart COGNOS.