Beginner to Cognos. 1

[kd7212]

Folks,
I am a mainframe developer with over 8 yrs experience. I would like to learn Cognos as its used at my workplace. I went through the introductory book covering the basics. I am looking forward to work on the software shortly. I am familiar with Access database and SQL.

Can some one help me with any suggestions for my learning process. I will be using it at work after I learn it.

How long will it take for me to learn ? Any steps to follow?

Thanks in advance.
KD.

 

[lmorgansky]

Depends on your orgs training budget...

If there is not budget, then the series of help PDFs that are installed with the production offer a good intro. They are all titled &quot;Discovering <product name here>...&quot;

If you have money for training, the intro classes are great. Check out

http://support.cognos.com/training/

for classes near you.

 

[Squish88]

I know that this sounds fairly simple, but one of the biggest things that I found out (that I didn't get in their class) was that the IQD's were simply text files with the SQL created by the IMR's in them. Just by being able to look at them (and thereby the associated SQL) I've been able to figure out quite a few little problems. It's simple, but really helpful.
I would also suggest using data files that you've extracted with your own SQL rather than IMR's when building cubes. Despite what they say, Cognos is fairly lousy at creating SQL, and the cube builds take WAY longer with the IMR's than they do with flat files.
One last thing, and this is just my opinion, if I were you I'd spend my money on a support contract (so that you can use the support site) rather than the classes. I've been to them, and short of a couple of little quirky tricks that may or may not be useful sometime in the future, they weren't all that great. Mostly stuff you could figure out on your own with a book or just fiddling around. The support site is invaluable though. Heck, when you call the support desk all they do is look on that site anyway!!
Anyway, Good Luck!! It's a little frustrating at first, but you do pick it up eventually. And you CAN change that stupid little fish...