Future of this blog and other things.

As of 9th April 2013, I left IBM to explore other things for my career. I worked with IBM for about 3 years and learned a lot.

IBM Cognos is a really awesome piece of software if you work on it. Sometimes it doesn't seem to work the way you expect it to, but it's not always software's fault. Through my experience, I learned there are ways to deal with IBM Cognos and that's why IBM certified professionals and there's so much talks and best practices documents.

As I leave IBM, I would not have any access to help from IBMers. However, I would be still willing to answer any queries that you have regarding IBM Cognos. You can submit your questions here.

ALERT: Security Bulletin: Multiple vulnerabilities in IBM Cognos BI 8.4.1,10.1, 10.1.1 and 10.2

Multiple vulnerabilities have been found in different version of IBM Cognos BI and would affect all existing installations until patch is applied.

Check out following link for detailed information.

https://www-304.ibm.com/connections/blogs/basupportlink/entry/alert_security_bulletin_multiple_vulnerabilities_in_ibm_cognos_bi_8_4_1_10_1_10_1_1_and_10_28?lang=en_us

Best Practices for Cognos Transformer

IBM Cognos Transformer is a powerful tool for creating cubes out of your data for faster analysis. These cubes are quite helpful as you could take them and do analysis on them. There are ways to make it secure too. However, what we often hear are issues about performance in Transformer.

Well, for that one must read the following guide about how to model a PowerCube.
http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/dm/cognos/modeling/powerplay_transformer/transformer_in_production.pdf

It's a really helpful documentation covering step by step procedure of cube and the best practices to get the max out of a PowerCube.

Let me know if you have any doubts on this by your comments.

IBM Cognos 10 BI SDK Application To Merge Reports

Some clients wish to merge reports, one after another. For that, IBM Cognos offers a utility to merge more than 1 reports. I worked on developing that with my colleague Jurgen. The Cognos SDK application is now published on IBM developerWorks.

You can read about the utility and how it works on the dW article (link provided below).

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ba-pp-development-utilities-page643/index.html

If you have any doubts or questions, feel free to comment!

How to enable 64-bit gateway in Cognos 10.2

With IBM Cognos 10.2, IBM introduced 64-bit gateways to be more efficient. Well, this new features isn't enabled by default when you install IBM Cognos 10.2

As a result, there's a step that you would have to follow to make your gateways run in 64-bit mode.
You'll have to open command prompt on Windows operating system and terminal on Linux/UNIX system.

Navigate to <Cognos 10.2 Installation Location>\cgi-bin\ folder

On Windows, type and run

copyGateMod.bat 64bit

On Linux/UNIX, type

./copyGateMod.sh 64bit

As a result, the 64-bit gateway files are copied from the cgi-bin/lib64 directory to the cgi-bin directory.

The official IBM documentation for this is located here.

IBM Cognos 10 Report Designer Certification

Back in March 2012, I had completed COG-612. That's another great certification and prerequisite to become IBM Cognos Specialist. The exam checks your knowledge of report designing, precisely the features of report studio that come alive when you are designing your intelligent reports.

For someone doing the report design, this test would be easy however it is still advised to go through the books. I used IBM's documentation to prepare for the test and that's a good place to learn from.

There are other books too, smaller ones like cookbook etc. You'll learn a lot from them even if they don't come in exam. I'm attaching the screenshot of certification, like earlier to keep readers motivated.

If anyone needs help in preparing, or got any question, feel free to contact me.

IBM's Documentation of deploying Cognos on Websphere

Some of the folks have been wondering about my earlier post that, is it the official documentation? What if it doesn't work?

Well, I didn't know that documentation existed for deploying Cognos on Websphere and tried multiple combinations, many of which didn't work out. I wouldn't say it was the discovery of something great, I'd rather say it's how I made it work and I continue to make that integration, with small changes for 64-bit versions.

A colleague of mine was searching for official documentation so I thought of sharing that with everyone. It's not easy to find as it doesn't contain the word "deploy" which is daily used by people dealing with application servers.

Here's the plain ibm's textual documentation link.
Feel free to explore the other sections around it for other application servers.

Need help in upgrading to IBM Cognos 10?

Businesses are upgrading to IBM Cognos 10, are you?

Well, if not IBM might be able to help you. All your queries regarding upgrade process, workflow, IBM offerings to ease the upgrade, everything you need is available here.

Check out the top upgrading to IBM Cognos 10 FAQs here.

There's an offering called IBM Cognos Lifecycle Manager which eases the process of upgrading along with assisting you during upgrade process.

Check out IBM Cognos Lifecycle Manager FAQs here.

There's a nice presentation about the whole upgrading process and best practices. You can get the presentation here.

Quick tips to improve bursting in IBM Cognos BI

Ever faced performance related issues with report bursting in IBM Cognos? Can't get enough work done in time from report bursting?

Here's a quick guide written to help you out. It contains tips and tricks at various points to improve performance in bursting. Go through it.

Here's the link 

Cognos Audit Logging: Demystified

Audit logging is one of many important administrative features available with IBM Cognos BI. However, it tends to confuse ibm cognos administrators with various levels and tables it has for it. For ibm cognos 10.1 (it applies the same to ibm cognos 8 except the grey ones), there's a chapter available in redbook for understanding Cognos Audit Logging.

The redbook (page 503 onward/ Chapter 10.5 Auditing), lists setting up audit db, various audit tables and their definitions and the effect each audit logging level would have in general sense. Although, this definition and effect of levels is generalized in Cognos environment sense, you could set up audit logging higher for a particular component to audit its usage.


Audit database table definitions

Table name	Description
COGIPF_ACTION	Stores information about operations performed on objects
COGIPF_AGENTBUILD	Stores information about agent mail delivery
COGIPF_AGENTRUN	Stores information about agent activity including tasks and delivery
COGIPF_ANNOTATIONSERVICE	Stores audit information about annotation service operations
COGIPF_EDITQUERY	Stores information about query runs
COGIPF_HUMANTASKSERVICE	Stores audit information about human task service operations (tasks and corresponding task states)
COGIPF_HUMANTASKSERVICE_DETAIL	Stores additional details about human task service operations (not necessarily required for every audit entry, for example, notification details and human role details)
COGIPF_NATIVEQUERY	Stores information about queries that IBM Cognos software makes to other components
COGIPF_PARAMETER	Stores parameter information logged by a component
COGIPF_RUNJOB	Stores information about job runs
COGIPF_RUNJOBSTEP	Stores information about job step runs
COGIPF_RUNREPORT	Stores information about report runs
COGIPF_THRESHOLD_VIOLATIONS	Stores information about threshold violations for system metrics
COGIPF_USERLOGON	Stores user logon and logoff information
COGIPF_VIEWREPORT	Stores information about report view requests

IBM Cognos audit and logging levels

System activity type	Minimal	Basic	Request	Trace	Full
System and service startup and shutdown, runtime errors	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
User account management and runtime usage		Y	Y	Y	Y
User requests		Y	Y	Y	Y
Service requests and responses			Y		Y
All requests to all components with their parameter values				Y	Y
Other queries to IBM Cognos components (native query)				Y	Y

IBM Cognos 10.1 FP1 adds support for more softwares

IBM Cognos 10.1 FP1 is out with support for more softwares. I just found out this link and prepared a list of all new things that have been added by FP1. See the following table for the newly added support

IBM Cognos BI 10.1    

Relational Databases	Client OS Support	Cognos BI 10 Server, Data Manager & Transformer
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2	AIX, HP-UX, Linux (x86), Solaris, Windows	Active (As of 10.1 FP1)

ODBC	Client OS Support	Cognos BI 10 Server, Data Manager & Transformer
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 via DataDirect 6.0 SP2	AIX, HP-UX (PA-RISC), Linux (x86), Solaris, Windows	Active (As of 10.1 FP1)
Netezza 6.0	AIX, HP-UX (PA-RISC), Linux (x86), Solaris, Windows	Active (As of 10.1 FP1)

OLAP Support	Database Client/ OS	Cognos BI 10 Server
IBM Cognos TM1 9.5.2	AIX, Linux (x86, System z) Solaris, Windows	Active (As of 10.1 FP1)
Oracle Essbase 11.1.2	AIX, Linux (x86), Solaris, Windows	Active (As of 10.1 FP1)

Dynamic Query Mode
OLAP Support	Client OS Support	Cognos BI 10 Server
CognosTM1 9.5.2	AIX, Linux (x86, System z), Solaris, Windows	Active (As of 10.1 FP1)
Oracle Essbase 11.1.2	AIX, Linux (x86), Solaris, Windows	Active (As of 10.1 FP1)

Content Stores via JDBC	Operating System	Cognos BI 10 Server
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition via JSQLConnect Driver	AIX, HP-UX, Linux (x86), Solaris, Windows	Active (As of 10.1 FP1)

IBM Cognos Mobile 10.1

Browsers	Operating System	Support
Playbook Browser	Blackberry Tablet OS	Active (As of 10.1 FP1)
Android Browser	Android 3.0+	Active (As of 10.1 FP1)

IBM Cognos Mobile to support Android 3.0 (honeycomb) and Blackberry Playbook

IBM Cognos Mobile has just announced with FP1 for their latest release of IBM Cognos Mobile 10.1 more support for tablets. IBM Cognos Mobile 10.1 FP1 will support Android browser also the Playbook browser. This is a giant step of IBM Cognos support towards tablets. Earlier only Apple Safari browser was supported with IBM Cognos Mobile 10.1.

Since the growth of tablets and Google and RIM launching their competitive tablets to Apple's iPad, support for these two browsers was much needed. Still, HP's webOS is missing from the list of supported environments, probably because HP's much awaited TouchPad still isn't available in market.

Check out the link for all supported environments for IBM Cognos Mobile 10.1.

SSO between Cognos 8.4.1 and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 using NTLM experiences

In a recent installation( better call it experiment), we were facing issues with integrating Cognos BI into Microsoft SharePoint portal and implementing SSO between them.

The setup was like this
-One machine having complete Cognos 8.4.1 installation.
-Another machine having Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 installation.

Both systems were using same ntlm domain for security. Due to performance considerations, we were not allowed to have both enterprise softwares running on same machine.

For intergration, we referred this document. It's written for version 8.3 but it still works fine for 8.4 and 8.4.1. A newer document for Cognos 10.1 with Sharepoint Server 2010 is in works, I guess.

We followed every step given in the document still landed up into errors like

"CPS-CCM-1209 Unable to create a URL connection to the requested WSDL file at 'path'
The remote server returned an error:(401) Unauthorized."

to 

HTTP 500: Internal server error.

Somehow, we were able to generate the XML from WSDL url, we were able to get Cognos objects into SharePoint but somehow it was not able to process our requests. 

I tried to debug at every point and still problem was not going away. We were exhausted up at this error.

"Unable to process the request" !!!

In webparts logging, we were seeing, 

"1,"error",

2011-05-06T04:13:35,"ctl00$m$g_c0624069_3bd3_49b5_8d11_13c980c2523d",1,"InitPersistentData(), Fault=System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException, Message=, Stack=   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(SoapClientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall)

   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters)

   at Cognos.Portal.Services.WSRP.WSRP_v1_Markup_Binding_SOAP.initCookie(initCookie initCookie1)

   at Cognos.Portal.Services.Consumer.GetCookies(Boolean retry)

   at Cognos.Portal.Services.Consumer.InitPersistentData()"

We brought in SME of this area and found out solution to this. If you land up in such situation, try this

1. Uninstall Cognos components from the machine having Microsoft SharePoint.

2. Have at least one gateway in Cognos which has "Enable Anonymous Access" and use that for configuring/integrating in SharePoint.

3. Copy all SharePoint files mentioned in the document from Cognos machine to SharePoint machine.

4. Modify settings accordingly.

5. Restart Cognos service and you'll have the integration done.

Shoot comments if you face any issue.

p.s. I would be posting step by step guide for integrating Cognos 10.1 with Websphere Portal 6.1 soon.

Changing default port of IBM Websphere

About a month back, I wrote how to deploy Cognos 10.1 on Websphere. However, I missed an important setting in it. Though logically, IBM Websphere detects and uses a free port for its application server, I didn't point out flexibility of changing it.

Users had to change the port in their IBM Cognos configuration, as mentioned in step 4 of preparing Cognos 10.1. Let me now show you how to configure IBM Websphere on a port that you want Cognos 10.1 to run.

1. Launch admin console of IBM Websphere.

2. Click on Application Servers, under Servers in the left side pane. You'll see server1, your Node and your version in right pane.

3. Click on server1, you'll  a lot of properties related to your IBM Websphere profile. Under Communications, expand Ports.

4. Clicking on Ports, will lead you to a page where you can modify ports used by IBM Websphere.

5. Click on WC_defaulthost to change it. It'll open up a new page, where you can change it. Since, Cognos by default uses port 9300, let's input that in here. Click on OK to apply changes.

6. If any of your applications running on your IBM Websphere is currently using the old WC_defaulthost port, it'll throw up something like this. You don't need to worry. Just click on save changes. Stop your applications. Modify ports in those applications and upgrade applications.

If no application was running, click on save and restart IBM Websphere server profile to apply the changes. For deploying Cognos, the steps remain the same.

If you face any problems or would like to discuss more on this, please leave a comment.