Help With Very Basic Questions...

[Veronica316]

Hi Everyone,

I'm a BusinessObjects Developer just starting out on Cognos, I have extensive experience in BusinessObjects, but I have a set of very basic questions I would dearly appreciate some help with, if you know some or all the answers to these Powerplay/Impromptu questions kindly let me know in your own words what you think (no need to be specific to any one platform or version, generic answers are just as welcome)...

Impromptu

1) How do you create a catalog ?
2) What are the differences between shared, and distributed catalogs ?
3) How do you create a self-join ?
4) How do you restrict the no of rows retrieved ?

Powerplay

1) How do u create a manual category ?
2) How do you do incremental update of a cube ?
3) What is the defualt view in explorer ?
4) Differences between explorer and reporter modes ?

IWR

1) How do you publish imr on web ?
2) How do you integrate IWR with Upfront ?

PPES

1) How do you publish a powerplay report on the web ?
2) How do you drill through from one cube to another
on upfront ?


Thanks for any help in advance.

Kind Regards,
Veronica Loria,
message_4_u2001@yahoo.com

 

[griffindm]

Hi Veronica,

Welcome to Cognos! We have a fairly lively community here, so you can expect good questions to get prompt answers. Regarding your questions:

Impromptu

1) Under the menu, go to Catalog | New and give the new catalog a name and location.

2) Shared catalogs are just another name for a catalog that can be opened by two users at the same time. Distributed and Secured are special cases of shared catalogs. Distibuted has kind of fallen out of favor in my experience over the past five years. It uses a master catalog that other users can have some control over, via distributed copies. There can be complications if you decide to change back to a simple shared catalog later. The Impromptu admin docs give a decent overview of the catalog types.

3) Self joins can be done either through a table alias, joined back to the original named instance of the table, with joins you define in Impromtpu, or via a SQL view that is established outside of Impromptu and referenced as a single object in Impromtpu.

4) The catalog governor, found under User Profiles in the catalog menu is where you can set restrictions such as number or rows retrieved, number of tables selected, max time for query, etc.

I'm more of an Impromptu user, so I'll let one of our many Powerplay users give you their advice on those questions.

IWR

1) Put all of your required report objects (report, catalog, graphic files, etc) into a single directory and then use the common product console to publish them to a web location and default inbox.

2) Upfront integration with Impromptu and Powerplay is automatic. You can use the products without Upfront, but it requires quite a bit of research to get the call correct to another portal. The majority of Upfront configuration issues relate to security and 'look and feel'. Again the docs provide somewhat of a starting point. If you are new to the product, take things incrementally and just get the basic portal and security working the way you need before getting too involved in Upfront customization.

4) PPES - Again, I'll let one of our PP gurus help you on these.

Regards,

Dave Griffin

The Decision Support Group
Reporting Consulting with Cognos BI Tools
"Magic with Data"
Want good answers? Read FAQ20-2863 first!

 

[Veronica316]

Thank you so much Dave, your help is invaluable !, I'm drawing some parallels with BO to see any similarities and so on or what the equivalent features are etc, so this is extremely helpful also to know for background purposes, thanks again Dave.


Kind Regards,
Veroinca Loria,
message_4_u2001@yahoo.com