Archiving is also available within Integrated Control Suite as a tool called Integrated Archive Service. This is a tool that runs on the backend so that end users are oblivious to its existence. It is used to shrink the size of growing content stores.

The problem is that IBM Cognos BI is designed in a way that utilizes the same database for storing both outputs (that is, Excel or PDF outputs from saved report runs) and application settings (that is, what objects are rendered on each screen, what objects are in which folders, and which services to use for each part of the application to run). A more logical solution would have been to separate these two functions. What happens is that as the content store grows with report outputs, activities such as folder navigation start to slow down because the database that is being used is just too big.

With Integrated Archive Service, stored outputs are moved to a separate database. The end result is that the content store size...