Cognos developer interview 2

[DrSmyth]

Hi, I'm new to the cognos forum and have a pretty general question. Basically I've not used Cognos before but have an interview as a cognos developer (they are providing training and I've used Business Objects which i understand is similar) and was wondering if anyone could provide some basic advice/summary so I can show the interviewer that I've at least attempted to find out about the role..

Cheers for any help you can offer... Could well be taking part in this forum a lot more if things go well..

 

[blom0344]

Hi DrSmyth,

Welcome to the Cognos world from a fellow (ex)-BO developer.

Be prepared to be bewildered cause Cognos takes quite a bit of time to get used to..

I have spend the last 2 years on Cognos after a 10 year stint with BO.

Not really a real expert yet, but I can quite possibly answer a lot of your questions , since our background is similar..

However where will I start? Do you any areas in particular you'd like to know about





Ties Blom

 

[DrSmyth]

Hi,

Seem to remember you helping me out with a few things in the BO forum in the past (for which I'm very grateful). As it transpires, the interview was earlier today and I've been given the job...

I do still have some questions though, how would you compare BO to Cognos, are there similarities between any of the elements (e.g. universes, reports, UDO's LOV's what if any are the Cognos equivalents?)

Also, is there any kind of Cognos bible that I can get as a reference?

 

[blom0344]

Let's start with some basics:

First there was Cognos7 with powerful client OLAP and iffy impromptu. The catalogue was the equivalent to the universe.

Then came Reportnet as an in-between phase.

With Cognos8 OLAP was transferred straight from the 7 version , but all other things changed.

The catalogue was replaced by framework (manager) that allows for some serious modelling that goes far beyond what BO offers with a universe. When done right it allows you to create a platform independant metadata layer.
The downside is the time it takes to develop.
The magic word in C8 modelling is the star. Get your modelling right and you'll have a potent metadata layer. Get it less than ideal and be prepared to suffer.

Cognos manages to deal with multiple RDBMS at the expense of transparency. All report SQL is first generated as a Cognos version and compiled on the C8 server to the native RDBMS SQL. This makes it pretty hard to take a quick peak at the SQL behind a report to check things.

The C8 main tooling comes in 3 flavors:

Report Studio

Webbased advanced reporting that offers tremendous value in terms of layout,conditional variables, prompting. It is very much more a tool for the developer than the old full client BO reporter. It shines when you want all the functionality you can think of. Being used to creating complex BO full client reports I was really shocked to find I could spend days to build something that would require a few hours in BO. The trick is that you're directly building in memory instead of using a client, which means rerunning the report again and again (version 8.3 will rectify this partly)
There are a few very strong elements to mention:

· use conditional variables for layout ( a la alerters) and for hiding/displaying parts of the report
· building great prompt pages with out-of-the box cascading prompts and such
· Good options to display as pdf / Excel
· Loads of out-of-the box report objects including tables,repeaters,conditional blocks etc

And some bad ones:

· Quite unstable in the earlier 8 versions
· Development time
· Multiquery no problem, but a report can just have one package as source (which relates to one universe, whereas in BO you could use synchronized dataproviders.

Query Studio

Enduser reporting for creating simple lists.
Offers too little value and is used sparsely (at least that’s my experience)

Analysis Studio

Allows you to use Cognos Powercubes or DMR data (dimensionally modeled data). Powerful and very stable. Aimed at the data analyst, not for management reporting

Cognos does not seem to allow experts to develop reference-books. A good source is the Knowledge base, but you need to have proper access.
A dedicated site:

http://www.cognoise.com

If you want to contact me directly you need to google my name combined with:
"the mountain where Tom Simpson died" (not the entire string, just the name of the mountain )
cause that's how old contacts seem to trace me..




Ties Blom

 

[xs4citrix]

Ties, no idea of the quality, but this is one of the only locations i found for cognos 8 books besides cognos manuals or official training guides:

http://www.cognosbooks.com

Stefan

http://www.printingsupport.com

 

[blom0344]

Good lead, have a star for the tip!!

Ties Blom

 

[DrSmyth]

Cheers for the info, relly appreciate the help.. Looking forward to getting to grips with what sounds like a pretty challenging piece of software..

Have a star for the input Ties