IBM Cognos Framework Manager is a modeling tool for creating and managing business related metadata available in all Cognos Business Intelligence applications. It allows modelers to model relational data dimensionally, apply hierarchies to allow drill behaviors, apply member functions, and query any of the supported data sources (relational database with SQL or OLAP with MDX).
The main users of Framework Manager are data warehouse developers and data modelers. Report authors use the metadata information, which is set up using Framework Manager when creating new reports.
It is not a standalone product, but a core backend tool used to build a foundation for Query Studio, Report Studio, and Analysis Studio.
Chapter 1, Getting Started, provides an overview of the configuration of Framework Manager, including details of how to run Framework Manager, and the main features of the user interface.
Chapter 2, Proven Practice, covers the proven practices to use when you are designing a new data model in Framework Manager.
Chapter 3, Importing Data Sources, covers the details of the different types of data sources that Framework Manager can import, and how to import your data sources.
Chapter 4, Modeling Relational Data, covers the modeling of the relationships between the data tables. After importing your metadata you must ensure it meets your users' reporting requirements.
Chapter 5, Modeling Dimensional Data, covers the use of Dimensional Modeling – more correctly Dimensionally Modeled Relational data (DMR).
Chapter 6, Creating the Business and Presentation Layers, covers the creation of the Business and Presentation layers. The Business layers are layers where we add business rules to our model to make it more user friendly. The Presentation layer is what your report authors will see in Report Studio, Query Studio, and Analysis Studio.
Chapter 7, Creating and Publishing Packages, covers the creation and publishing of your packages. Once all the layers of the model have been created we have to present the model to your report authors for them to use.
Chapter 8, Maintaining Projects, covers the techniques for ensuring that changes to the data sources are reflected in your model. This chapter also covers the techniques to allow multi-user modeling.
Chapter 9, Model Design Accelerator, covers Model Design Accelerator, which simplifies the creation of relational star schema models. It will assist both novice and expert modelers to build Framework Manger models without needing extensive experience and training.
Chapter 10, Parameter Maps, covers Parameter Maps, which can be used to create conditional query subjects that allow for substitutions when a report is run.
Appendix, Data Warehouse Schema Map, shows details of the Schema Map for the Data Warehouse used in Chapter 9, Model Design Accelerator.
To use the examples in this book you will need a copy of IBM Cognos Framework Manager, and this software is only available as a Microsoft Windows program.
All examples have been developed using IBM Cognos Framework Manager 10.1.1.
The examples in Chapter 9, Model Design Accelerator, will only work with IBM Cognos Framework Manager 10, since this was a new feature in IBM Cognos 10.
All other examples should work with any version of IBM Cognos Framework Manager.
To function correctly, Framework Manager requires a suitably configured IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server. Many of the examples make use of the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Samples, so the following software is also required:
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server – this needs to be the same version as Framework Manager.
A suitable webserver for example, Apache Webserver or Microsoft IIS.
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Samples – any version but preferably the same version as Framework Manager.
SQL Server 2008 – to load the data used in Chapter 9, Model Design Accelerator, and as a suitable database for loading IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Samples.
This book will be useful to all developers, both novice and expert, who use IBM Cognos Framework Manager to build packages for use by Report Studio, Query Studio, and Analysis Studio reports.
Readers are expected to have a basic understanding of reporting in IBM Cognos and are advised to get some hands-on experience of one or more Cognos studios. This book will only cover IBM Cognos Framework Manager.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Common session parameters that you may see include account.personalInfo.email, account.personalInfo.firstname, and account.personalInfo.surname."
A block of code is set as follows:
SELECT "product_name_lookup"."product_number" AS "PRODUCT_NUMBER",
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Go to Start | All Programs | IBM Cognos 10 | IBM Cognos Configuration."
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