Automated Cube Refresh - Cognos 8BI

[rkiss]

Hi,

Does anyone have a solution to the following issue:

Issue: Daily Automated Cube Refresh in Cognos 8 BI.

Current issues/points:

1. It looks like you cannot over-ride a cube file if there is an open Cognos 8BI session...
2. How do you force to kill all open sessions in order to over ride the cube file with the new version...
3. I am not looking to rename file every day (as suggested by Cognos)

Does anyone have a working solution?

Thank you,

Roman

 

[JGirl]

Hi - this probably isnt the answer you are looking for, but I can guarantee it will work!

Build your cubes to a temp area, such as as "cube builds" directory. Then at some time when no one is using cognos, and when all your cube builds are finished, (like 3am in the morning) kick off a bat file that stops the cognos 8 service, copies the cubes to the production directory, and restarts the service.

J

 

[rkiss]

Thank you for your reply...

Well,...
Your solution would probably work in a medium size company....We are a global,5000 employee corporation....therefore...we cannot take the gable that no one will be using the application...Restarting Services would take anywhere between 1 - 3 minutes...that is a long downtime for our corporation...

Cognos Support sent us a document about cube swaping....not the solution I was hoping for as you need to rename the Cognos Cube connection, but at this point there is nothing else...

Thank you again...

Roman

 

[mfgf]

Did you look at Cognos 8's CubeSwap utility?

First, you could modify your Transformer Model to create two versions of the same cube - call them CubeA and CubeB. Initially you could build CubeA to your cubes folder, and point your Cognos 8 connection at it. The next day, you could fire off Transformer to build CubeB to your cubes folder, then use the Cognos 8 CubeSwap command to modify the Cognos 8 data source to point at CubeB instead of CubeA. The next day, get Transformer to build (and replace) CubeA, then CubeSwap your connection back to that one again. And so on.

This process does not involve stopping and starting the Cognos 8 service, and can be done entirely from the command line (and thus can be scheduled if required).

Best regards,

MF.

 

[rkiss]

Hi MF,

Your solution is similar to our solution...

We have one macro file where we detect the day (even or odd number) of the week. If it is an even number, the macro will build the cube to "Even Number" folder on the same server and using the CubeSwap utility, we will replace the current Power Cube connection. The same idea is applied to the odd number of the week....

It is not the ideal way of doing it...as we would like to keep one cube connection, that would require stopping Services...meaning downtime....

I asked Cognos Support if there is a way of killing all current processes on the package so the PowerCube can be replaced...they did not get back to me yet..

Regards,

Roman

 

[mfgf]

Hi,

If you have a working solution, why change it? Why is it not ideal? You keep one cube connection - you just modify it each day.

You will find there is no easy way to kill the connection to the cube file, as even if nobody is accessing it, the Cognos 8 server will keep the connection open and cached for a set period of time (to remove the overhead of re-establishing the connection if someonce wants to use it again soon)

The Query Engine component (CQE) of the Cognos 8 Server has a database connection pool that is governed by two parameters:

Pool size - This is set to 20 by default.
If there are 20 active connections, further requests for new connections will be rejected.

Timeout - This is set to 900 seconds (15 minutes) by default.
Freed connections will linger for this Timeout value before they are closed. If a new request matches a freed connection in terms of database sign on, the freed connection will be re-used (same DB attach). Otherwise, the new request will "steal" a freed connection by closing it and re-attaching to the database using the new database sign on.

The above settings are in the file
Program Files\cognos\c8\configuration\CQEConfig.xml

Cognos 8 by default does not have the CQEConfig.xml file installed, and has the file named as CQEConfig.xml.sample. To activate, just copy, and rename it and modify the values 'Timeout' and 'Poolsize'

Regards,

MF.