Business Intelligence, Analytics and Cognos

Our database development team shared a great news that I must post here. In my previous post, I mentioned about how Cognos BI (Report Studio and Analysis Studio) stop showing numbers for aggregated levels as soon as any rule is added to the TM1 cube. Well, as per the documentation from IBM, the latest version of TM1 (v10.1.1) solves this problem. Please see below from the IBM documentation: Rule-aware aggregation in Cognos TM1 and Cognos BI IBM Cognos TM1  now allows the aggregation computation to take into account  Cognos TM1  cube rule definition so that Aggregate computations are now aware of  Cognos TM1  cube rules. In previous versions of  Cognos TM1  the default aggregation could not be computed by the Cognos Business Intelligence (BI) server when applied to  Cognos TM1  rule-calculated cells. With rule-aware aggregation in place, the aggregation numbers are reported based on the semantics of the  Cognos TM1  ru...

I have been meaning to write about my experiences and learning of writing Cognos Reports (version 8.4) over TM1 cube since long. Finally got around doing it today. In coming days, I will keep on adding new points that I learn and are worth mentioning. The most irritating and strange behaviour we saw during this development is – many standard OLAP reporting features of Cognos stop working after you put rules in the TM1 cube. These features are: 1. Automatic Aggregation: All the measure with aggregation set to automatic stop working and you have to define the aggregation function. i.e. Total in most cases. 2. Slicer and Row Member sharing: Often you put many slicers in query each based on a prompt. So you might have slicers on Dates, Products, Location, Currency, Scaling, etc. These will be standard in all reports with standard prompts and irrespective of what dimensions you have in crosstab report. However, after putting rules in TM1 cube, if we have a dimension in rows or columns (sa...

Congratulation to Ankit Garg on publication of his book on Cognos TM1! Another addition to PACKT's cookbook series with this great contribution by Ankit Garg to the world of BI. Please do check out this book today. . A comprehensive developer’s guide for planning, building, and managing practical applications with IBM TM1 . No prior knowledge of TM1 expected . Complete coverage of all the important aspects of IBM TM1 in carefully planned step-by-step practical demos . Practical recipes that illustrate the use of various TM1 features http://www.packtpub.com/ibm-cognos-tm1-for-planning-budgeting-forecasting-solutions-cookbook/book

Written by: Ankit G Cognos planning (EPS) was the flagship planning and budgeting solution from Cognos until Cognos took over Applix and hence TM1. Now they are promoting both the products as planning and budgeting solution. I have installed and evaluated both but did not find much differences, as long as application is concerned (in order to recommend one over the other). Some points I found worth noting are: 1) EPS has got a better workflow management and matured front end, hence if you have large number of users spread across various locations who want to collaborate and enter planning data, EPS would be a better solution than TM1. 2) EPS works on a 32 bit engine. Analyst has difficulty while loading large slices of data in contiguous RAM. Contributor also moves large blocks of data in and out of datastore in the form of xml. Hence scalability and performance is a problem in case the data is in very large volumes. TM1 uses 64 bit architecture and hence faster while dealing large amo...