Do you allow users to run Report Studio in PROD?

[mjcotter]

Hi, I'm curious what people are doing for Report Studio in their Production environments? Management here is very fearful of allowing the end users the ability to use and run Report Studio in Production. The fear is that users can potentially create and run queries that could take down the database. Note: We are allowing them to use Query Studio in Production.

Do you allow your end users to use Report Studio in Production?

We are currently running Cognos BI 8.2 with plans to migrate to 8.4 during the 1st quarter of next year.

Thanks!
Matt

 

[blom0344]

We consider Report Studio a developer's tool. A limited group is allowed to run pre-designed reports (that have been tested thoroughly) and 'casual' users (those interested in creating simple lists) may use query studio.

Taking down the database is one risk, the other one is flooding the Cognos server. Cognos is not exactly a 'lean and mean' tool if you know what I mean



Ties Blom

 

[mjcotter]

I agree that all end users should not have Report Studio. Most do not have the need or the knowledge. Not to mention it's too costly!
We plan to give a small subset of "power" users Report Studio in Production. Overall, we have probably 300 users and initially there will be less than a dozen that have Report Studio. These "power" users will create reports for their staff and for upper level management. We'll turn off access to SQL in Report Studio, so they will not be able to edit SQL or write custom SQL. If we've done our job and modeled correctly, then turning off the SQL should limit the exposure of them creating runaway queries.

We're also going down this path to limit potentially disasterous results to our entire user base... the Report Studio "power" users will run against a completely separate mirrored database. This way, if they crash the database, then they will only be affecting other "power" users. Also, we will have two Cognos 8 Windows servers, running load balancing, and we will restrict Report Studio "power" users to run on only 1 of the servers. Again, this way, if they crash Cognos 8, then they are only crashing one of the Windows servers and all other users will be able to continue to run on the other one.