- Speed of various components within Cognos 10 BI;
- 64bit & DQS;
- Nice new features;
- Upgrading from Cognos 8.4
What is clearly visible from the first time you enter a freshly installed portal is the responsivenes. Every click you make seems much more snappy and the portal comes back with a refreshed window much faster than it used to be in the Cognos 8.x series. It is also valid after all old content is transfered and upgraded from C8.4 to C10.1, which indicates that the Content Store interface has been finetuned a lot! This also affects how reports are generated and it is very clear that Content Store related lag is absent in the latest version. That is some great news!
Related to performance is the possibility to use 64bit processing and DQS. Now here is something that marketing over-promissed. Both things seem to theoretically make the software faster, but no matter how good DQS is, it does not support the old PowerPlay cubes and many-to-many relationships. Don't get me wrong, I don't really like either PowerPlay cubes or many-to-many relationships. But as they are theoretical old timers and nonos, they are a part of reality. At least for some more time to come. And here is the catch- the only processing mode on 64bit engine is DQS. It is mandatory. Period.
So what that means in real-life? Well, if you have a distributed environment, then you could run different servers on different modes and use routing of data sources to make sure that SSAS or 'correct' relational models are going through 64bit servers and the old timers should be routed via 32bit machines. If you are running on one server, then you are surely stuck with 32bits. And that is sad. Period.
Knowing this background one can raise the question of future life and support of PowerPlay cubes and Transformer in general. For me it is beyond obvious that any company would like to use DQS on 64bit environment to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of the system. No support for the legacy tools within systems of tomorrow only indicates that they are about to be discontinued and the future will lie with TM1. Speculations...
Now back to reality. There are some nifty things about Cognos 10. One of the personal favorites from developer standpoint is the Select Whole objet icon in Report Studio:
This is a great way to select the whole object, no matter whether it is a chart, table or crosstab. The old way of selecting all of something is dead. Well done!
Another interesting addition is external data sources within Report Studio. Good feature. Got its ups and downs, but definitely usefull for prototyping or single-user reports. I think this feature will require a post of it's own as this one is becoming quite long already!
Just as well a separate topic is the new chart engine. You have to be proactive to enable them and, to be honest, they don't seem to be that much faster at first glance. But I will do more thorough tests and come back with some numbers to clear up my suspicion.
The final thing to mention is upgrade from Cognos series 8.4: smooth. That is all there is to say for it. Just export your 8.4 content store, import it to a fresh installation of 10.1 and off you go. The only considerations are regarding layout and templates, so if you have a customised CSS of the portal you will have to do it one more time. Also, some dashboards don't fit in their old setup, so i.e. if you had a portlet split into 20% and 80% sections, you might need to change that to 30/70. No idea why, though...
That, however, is no big deal compared to the benefit of better performance your users get with Cognos 10.1. That and the small fixes for developers make this a definite YES for upgrade! And with time, once you've completely killed all legacy data sources, you will have one nice and fast environment!
M.
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