Book Image

IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook

By : Abhishek Sanghani
Book Image

IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook

By: Abhishek Sanghani

Overview of this book

Cognos Report Studio is widely used for creating and managing business reports in medium to large companies. It is simple enough for any business analyst, power user, or developer to pick up and start developing basic reports. However, when it comes to developing more sophisticated, fully functional business reports for wider audiences, report authors will need guidance. This book helps you understand and use all the features provided by Report Studio to generate impressive deliverables. It will take you from being a beginner to a professional report author. It bridges the gap between basic training provided by manuals or trainers and the practical techniques learned over years of practice. This book covers all the basic and advanced features of Report Authoring. It begins by bringing readers on the same platform and introducing the fundamental features useful across any level of reporting. Then it ascends to advanced techniques and tricks to overcome Studio limitations.Develop excellent reports using dimensional data sources by following best practices that development work requires in Report Studio. You will also learn about editing the report outside the Studio by directly editing the XML specifications. Provide richness to the user interface by adding JavaScript and HTML tags. The main focus is on the practical use of various powerful features that Report Studio has to offer to suit your business requirements.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Introduction


This chapter will discuss some concepts that you should know when developing reports against dimensional or DMR (Dimensionally Modeled Relational) sources. We will use two packages in this chapter. The "GO Data Warehouse (analysis)" package is of DMR type, whereas 'GO Sales SSAS Cube' is a SQL Server Analysis cube-based package which is purely dimensional in nature.

The GO Data Warehouse (analysis) package comes as a standard sample with Cognos installation and can also be downloaded from the Packt website.

I have created the "GO Sales SSAS Cube package" to connect to the Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) cube that comes with the Cognos sample installation. You can also use other sample cubes (Essbase or Powercube). You can download this package from the Packt website or even easily create one.