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Book Review: IBM Cognos 10 Framework Manager, by Terry Curran

| cognospaul

A well built metamodel is essential for any successful Cognos project. This book offers a solid guide to the best practices for building your model. The entire process of building a model, from joins to dimensional layers, is described in detail.

The chapters are ordered logically, first describing the tool and the various buttons and basic functionality, and then moving on to the advanced features. The book describes the entire process of building a model according to the most effective practices. Modellers will be well suited to keep this book open while building a model, even if it’s just to keep them on track.

In addition to describing the standard modeling features, the book also describes some advanced methods. Various multiuser modelling strategies are detailed; session parameters and parameter maps are explained with useful examples.

Terry does not go into every single trick, or explain how to fix every single bug in a given model (if he did, it would probably have to be several thousand pages long). However, he does lay down a set of guidelines which will provide for a portable and efficient model.

My only criticism is that it is sometimes too short. Some sections feel more like “how-to” guides that give step by step instructions without explaining the theory behind it.

Ultimately, both users who are unfamiliar with Framework, and veterans with years of experience will find it useful to read through and to keep it as a reference.

The book may be purchased from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Cognos-Framework-Manager-ebook/dp/B00CXPRD4G or directly from Packt http://www.packtpub.com/ibm-cognos-10-framework-manager/book

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Information On Demand 2013!

| cognospaul

Well, it’s once again time to start planning for the IOD. It was worth every penny last year, and I am certain it will only be better this year. The IOD is a great place to connect with other IBM business partners and customers. Where else can you talk with people from Boeing and Costco while eating breakfast? One of my most memorable moments was waiting for the flight back, talking to a woman from the Miami-Dade police on the way they use Cognos and BI to catch criminals.

The sessions are broken out by tracks of interest. Each track can have multiple sessions at the same time. To my despair, it’s impossible to attend more than one simultaneously. In addition to the sessions, there are hands on workshops about what you can do with the latest technology. The people manning the workshops are knowledgeable and will very cheerfully talk about how their tools work.

The early bird special ends June 28 for customers (September 13 for business partners), so I recommend registering earlier rather than later. You may want to contact your Cognos business partner of choice to find out if they have a promo code this year. So far I am aware of only three companies that are offering early bird registration specials, The following list is informational, they are in alphabetical order and I am not endorsing any one company over another, more will be added as more companies come out with deals. Feel free to leave a comment if you know of any others that should be mentioned.

  1. BSP – G13BSPSOFT
  2. Ironside – G13IRONSDE
  3. Motio – G13MOTIO
  4. PerformanceG2 – G13PERFG2

I’m holding off registering until IBM let’s me know if my session proposal has been accepted (I hear that they received over 2500 sessions proposals this year, so chances are slim).

Obviously, I am planning on going this year, and I have an offer. If any company wants to sponsor my trip (partially or fully) I will very happily give their products a completely biased review and will randomly tell people how awesome my sponsors’ products are. (Or I could do work for them, or something. I’m open to suggestions.)

And remember – PerformanceG2 for all your training needs!

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Playing with MotioCI

| cognospaul

A few posts back I gave a sneak peek of a new tool Motio was working on. Recently I was fortunate enough to get into the beta.

The installation, for the most part, is fairly straight forward. You download, decompress, modify a few config files to declare which version of Cognos you’re running, location of your JDK. The only major stumbling block I had was Motio requires some sort of authentication against Cognos. Since I was running Cognos anonymously on my laptop, it simply wouldn’t connect. To get around this, I set up OpenDJ and was able to progress.

Once MotioCI is installed and set up, it will create an instance. Each instance is a connection to a specific Cognos server. You can have as many instances as you have Cognos gateways. You can communicate between instances. So, for example, you can a report in Instance 1 to get specific results, and compare them to results in Instance 2. This is all part of the assertions, which I will get into later.

After you create an instance, you will be prompted to create a new project. Create the new project with a descriptive name and continue. The wizard will walk you through selecting which folders you want to test against which assertions. It comes with a suite of default assertions created by Motio and the Best Practices team. Once selected, it will generate test cases and run them.

Generate Test Cases

After the test cases run, you can see which reports have failures or warnings. You can see the results of the test cases, and the outputs of the reports themselves (if the test cases required the reports to run).
failing on assertions
The most interesting part of this tool is the Assertion Studio. This is where you can define the assertions.

Assertions allow you to test almost every aspect of any Cognos object. Do you have a corporate look and feel that every report must follow? Set up a template report and compare each and every report against that. Do you want to find every report that has a run time of more than 5 minutes? Do you want to automatically compare the output of a series of reports against specific SQL queries? Are you upgrading from 8.2 and need to find all instances of the old JS API? Do you want to test your dispatchers for certain settings and response times? The possibilities are endless.

When you design your own assertions you can specify whether the report needs to be executed or not. Executing the report allows you to check things like run time, or results match. Does the third row in the list match the first row of another report? Not executing allows you to use combinations of xpath and regex to parse the report (or model) xml. You might use that to find all reports that contain “formwarprequest” in HTML items.

There is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to MotioCI. It is definitely not something you’d give end users. It does seem to be an invaluable tool for administrators.

You can read more about it at the Motio Website.