Friday, October 5, 2012

What is new in COGNOS 10.2?


The COGNOS 10.2 was released on 10th Sep 2012. I had opportunity in last few weeks to explore the COGNOS 10 and this has been very interesting journey so far. It’s amazing to see on how IBM COGNOS 10 has taken this tool forward and very well aligned with future needs of Mobile BI and Self Service Business Intelligence. Not enough, now COGNOS 10.2 has connectivity for the Big Data as well which I feel is going to play a very important role in near future.

In this blog post I am going to be focused on the new enhancements on the IBM COGNOS 10.2 version. Please note that I am not talking about the COGNOS 10 features and it’s going to be specific to the COGNOS 10.2 which was released last month in Sep-12.
Some of the features are listed below

Dynamic Cubes

I think this is the most significant feature in the COGNOS 10.2 release. The most important thing is there is no additional licensing involved for this feature and customers need not buy anything separately.

The dynamic cube comes with the concept of the In -Memory analysis very similar to what other major BI vendors like SAP, Microsoft, SAS and Oracle have.
 
 





Ø  The dynamic cube model is build using the Dynamic Query Mode (DQM) functionality. Also these cubes use the extensive caching capabilities to efficiently store data within the memory.

Ø  The dynamic cube supports the relational Star or Snow flake schema and provides an OLAP experience without sacrificing on high performance. Some of the key highlights are mentioned below

Ø  100 % In Memory Engine with high performance and low data latency.

Ø  Aggregate recommendation to allow query routing to in memory or physical aggregate table in data warehouse.

Ø  New OLAP modeling tool called Cube Designer provides better OLAP experience. The Cube Designer tool is integrated with the COGNOS Framework Manager.

Ø  Multiple cubes can share the conformed dimensions.

Ø  Dynamic cubes can connect to the relational databases including aggregated tables to provide the OLAP style analytics.

Ø  Once the dynamic cubes are created and published as package, they can be accessed similar to any other OLAP packages.

Now the question comes on what is going to happen to existing Transformer and PowerCubes? I believe they still are going to be there and Dynamic Cubes will be a kind of complement in the existing environment. The decision to go with the Dynamic Cubes or PowerCube will be purely dependent on the Business need on each and every scenario.
 

COGNOS Workspace (AKA Business Insight)

IBM COGNOS 10.2 has done the renaming of the Business Insight and Business Insight Advance to Cognos Workspace and Cognos Workspace Advance. I think this new naming convention is clearer and reduces the confusion around and should be a welcoming change. There are some enhancements done in the Cognos 10.2 Workspace as listed below
 
Ø  Muti Tab Support

I believe this is the coolest enhancement in the Workspace.

Now we do not need to worry about shuffling around horizontal and vertical scrolling. We can easily expand our visual footprints in various tabs without the need to scroll.
 
Ø  Now we can freeze and unfreeze the crosstab columns and rows.


Ø  Support for the Google Chrome and Safari browsers.

 
COGNOS Mobile

Cognos Mobile was one of the major enhancements in the 10.1 release. In the10.2 release there have been some enhancements with respect to mobile

Ø  Cognos Mobile now supports the push notification. The users will be notified when a new of version of the report is available. 

Ø  The page streaming feature has been added which helps in reducing the load time before viewing the reports. 

Ø  Administrators now can secure the mobile access which can help organizations to implement the BYOD (Bring your own device) policy within the organization.

 
Report Studio

Report Studio has fewer but higher impact enhancements.

Ø  Prompt API

A fully supported API is available in the 10.2 release. This will help to extend the prompting capabilities. This java script based prompt API can be used for reading, deleting and validating the prompt value. This means now we can add the validations in the various prompt before users run the reports. The Prompt API is supported only in
 

ü  Report Studio for authoring

ü  Cognos Viewer for consumption

ü  Cognos Workspace/ Advance

 

Ø  Excel Output Changes

Excel 2010 is still not an output format but the Excel 2007 output capabilities have been expanded. Now the Cognos reports can export the data with increased limit of maximum of 16,384 columns and about 1 million rows. 

 

Architecture Enhancements

Ø  Support for new Data Sources 

ü  SQL Server and Analysis Services 2012
ü  Salesforce.Com
ü  SAP ECC
ü  Siebel
ü  Big Data Support : Hadoop and Hive

As you might see above, the support for Big Data is very significant. I believe this is going to be one of the key features in coming next few years as the Big data is coming in reality.

Also apart from support for some other ERP vendors like SAP and Oracle you might notice that now 10.2 can host the content store on SQL Server 2012 and also have ability to connect to the SQL Server 2012 cubes.
 

Ø  64 Bit – Now the entire remaining 32 bit component gets an update to 64 bit. This means now Cognos 10.2 is fully 64 bit.

 

Ø  Multi Tenancy – Cognos 10.2 now supports native multi- tenancy.

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