After the installation, the first thing that you will need to do, in order to take advantage of your new Cognos BI environment, is to add a data source. A data source is a connection used to connect a set of data. In this case, it is a connection to connect data that you want to use for building reports. Cognos BI can connect to virtually any data source. There are native connections available for most major data source types, including but not limited to, DB2, SQL Server, Oracle, Neteeza, and so on. In addition to this, you can create ODBC data source connections to any data source that is supported through ODBC, and you can connect to nontraditional data sources through a tool that is delivered free of charge with Cognos BI called IBM Virtual View Manager. With the addition of Dynamic Query Mode, it is best practice to use JDBC drivers to connect to data sources so that Dynamic Query Mode can be fully utilized.

Let's walk through creating a data source connection...