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.

What is CMCAPACITY table?

Recently, I was approached for clarification on CMCAPACITY table and what does it do. Well here's the simple answer

The CMCAPACITY  table keeps track of the registered dispatchers.  Just do a test on your machine, when you start CM, you'll see your dispatcher with usage = 4 and when you shutdown, it should be blank.
 

If CM has a row = 4  and CM is not running, it could have been improperly shutdown or something of that nature. If there is a usage of 4, it can prevent CM from locking the content store DB on start-up of IBM Cognos.

Well, if you love complex answers, there an developer works article and utilities about understanding your Cognos Content Store database using Content Manager Size and Browser Tools

You can get that here http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-0808masters/