1.What is called the Cognos Reporting tool? What is a Report item?
Cognos is an IBM reporting tool which is used for reporting and analysis of various data from different data warehouses. Report item is defined as a query item which can be dragged and dropped into a work area.
2.What is set to be Cardinality?
Cardinality is defined as relationships between the tables. Following are relationships formed between the tables.
•One to One
•One to Many
•Many to Many
•Many to One
3. What is defined as Data mining? What are all the different types of prompt in Cognos?
Data mining : Data mining is the process of getting hidden trends from a data warehouse.
Following are the different types of prompt in Cognos:
•Value prompt
•Text Prompt
•Date prompt
•Time prompt
•Date and time prompt
4. What are the components of Report Net?
Following are the components of Report Net:
•Framework manager
•Cognos connection
•Query Studio
•Report Studio
5. What is a Cube? What is the size of the cube?
The Cube is set to be a multi-dimensional view of dimension and measures and it is used to analyze the data in various forms like Slicing and Dicing. Size of the cube is 2.0GB and size varies depending on the project.
6. What is Dynamic Cube?
Dynamic Cubes are in-memory OLAP cubes that load data directly from relational data sources that are structured in a star or snowflake schema
•Introduced as a new feature from IBM Cognos BI
•The Cognos Dynamic Cubes technology is part of the IBM Cognos BI query stack
•The goal of IBM Cognos Dynamic Cubes is to provide quick response to reports and analyses on large volumes of data.
•Enabling high-performance interactive analysis over terabytes of data
7. Cognos Dynamic Cube solution consists of what elements?
IBM Cognos Dynamic Cube consists of the following elements, they are:
•IBM Cognos Cube Designer
•IBM Cognos Dynamic Cubes Server
•Aggregate Advisor (part of IBM Cognos Dynamic Query Analyzer)
8. When to use Cognos Dynamic Cubes?
Data Warehouse with star or snowflake schema
•A server with adequate memory
•A database with approximately 25 million or more fact table rows
9. What is Cognos Cube Designer?
•Cognos Cube Designer is used to model Dynamic Cubes
•Install IBM Cognos Cube Designer in the same location as IBM Cognos Framework Manager
•We need a JDBC data source connection created in Cognos Administration
10. Cognos Dynamic Cubes support various databases.
Supported Databases (in the current 10.2 release) include IBM DB2, IBM Netezza, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata.
11. What do you mean by Drill Through report?
Drill through reporting is used to link from one report to another report. It has a parent and child relationship between the reports.
12. Mention the difference between ‘macros’ and ‘prompt’?
Macro is used to run a set of instructions to execute the report but prompt provides a way to change the report dynamically.
13. What is a Snapshot?
A snapshot is created to copy the exact data that is related to the current report and compare with another report.
Example: Data of this week compared with previous week.
14. How do you administer Dynamic Cube?
Administration tasks include assigning the cube to the QueryService instance, starting it, monitoring its health, and refreshing its contents.
•Start/Stop the Cube
•Monitoring Cube
•Managing the cache
•Scheduling a refresh of the cache
15. What is Model Durability?
All of the following criteria must be met in order to have what is considered to be a durable model:
•There is a design language created for the model that is not the same as the locales the users can choose from. For English, the design language is typically English(Zimbabwe).
•The design language name of all namespaces, query subjects, and query items that are published in a package must never change after the package is initially published. Other language names can change as needed, though.
•The structure of a published package’s namespace(s), query subjects, query items, dimensions, shortcuts, etc, must not change over time. This structure is stored in a specification’s definition, along with the design language’s names, so this is the reason these must not change.
•In IBM Cognos 8.4.1 the element must exist in model.xml. In IBM Cognos 10 the project level property Use Design Locale for Reference ID must be set to true.
16.What is New Content Durability?
All new content developed with IBM Cognos BI will be durable, as long as the model is durable. Existing non-durable content can be made durable by appropriately replacing the non-durable components of those specifications with durable components. Existing content is generally made durable over time as the content gets updated for reasons other than durability.
17. How do you create security features for cubes?
For creating security features in cubes we can use the user class views and dimension views.
Dimension views help in hiding certain data from the cube depending on what view you are using.
Then we can use the user class views to the cubes for making that data available for a certain role or group.
We can also use password protection is another way of providing security to the cubes.
18.What is the user class in Cognos?
A user class is a group of users who need access to the same data and have the same access privileges. The administrator creates the catalog and user classes. Other people in an organization may also create and maintain user classes for the employees in their own department or area.
You can add user classes to a catalog if you created the catalog or you are working with a personal copy of a distributed catalog and your administrator gave you the privilege to add and modify user classes.
19. What is the Framework Manager?
Framework Manager is a tool that allows you to make data sources known for use within the various Cognos suites and allows you to add additional logic and details. Within a logical Cognos architecture, a Framework Manager model contains the logic and information required for one of the Cognos tools to use a data source.
20. Explain IBM Cognos Framework Manager Model?
IBM Cognos Framework Manager is a metadata modeling tool that drives query generation for IBM Cognos software. A model is a collection of metadata that includes physical information and business information for one or more data sources. IBM Cognos software enables performance management on normalized and denormalized relational data sources and a variety of OLAP data sources.
21. What are the layers available in the Framework Manager Model?
The Framework Manager model consists of three layers:
1.Database layer
2.Logical Layer
3.Dimensional layer
22. What is the IBM Cognos Framework Manager model database layer?
The physical, or database, layer contains a database query subject for every table in the physical data model. The database layer also contains alias shortcuts, which behave as if they were a copy of the original object with completely independent behavior.
23. What is the IBM Cognos Framework Manager model logical layer?
The logical layer contains query subjects that draw data from the database query subjects and present it in a more consumable format.
24. What is the IBM Cognos Framework Manager model dimensional layer?
The dimensional layer contains the hierarchies and measure dimensions for publication to a package. Each dimension in the logical layer has a dimension in the dimensional layer with one or more hierarchies defined. The hierarchies usually include the caption field twice, once as a caption for the level, once as an attribute that can be used in report filters. All hierarchies are sorted.
25. What is the IBM Cognos Framework Manager model security?
No security is defined for the IBM Cognos Framework Manager model other than the provision for filtering by the tenant_id parameter on the physical layer. These query subject filters can be converted to security filters that are based on user IDs, allowing multi-tenant access to one database.
26. What are query items?
Query items are the most important object in framework manager and it has a lot of properties associated with it. This is mainly used for reporting and business intelligence.
27. What are all the advantages of Cognos?
Following are the advantages of Cognos:
•Planning
•Analysis
•Forecasting
•Scorecard
28. What are all the types of indexes in Cognos?
Following are the types of Indexes in Cognos:
•Bitmap index
•B-tree index
•Function based index
•Reverse key and composite index
29. What is the Bitmap Index?
A bitmap index is used for replacement of a list of rowids for each key value. This index is mainly efficient for data warehousing as it has low cardinality and low updates.
30. What is a Folder?
A folder consists of repository objects like sources, targets, transformation and mapping that help to organize data warehouse.
31. What is a Datastore in Cognos?
A data store is nothing but a query database or a relational database or files that can be accessed through IBM Cognos.
32. What is a Query Subject?
A Query subject is a set of query items that have inherent relationship and it is a basic building block on framework managers.
33. What are all the types of gateway used in Cognos?
Following is the list of gateway used in Cognos:
•Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
•Internet Service Application Interface (ISAPI)
•Tomcat Server
34. What is called Cognos powerplay? What are the types of studios present in Cognos?
Cognos powerplay is nothing but a multidimensional on-line analysis of data. There are five types of studio are :
•Query Studio
•Metrics Studio
•Analysis Studio
•Report Studio
•Event Studio
35. What is defined as a Query studio?
Query studio is one of the studios in Cognos which is used to perform Ad Hoc queries.
36. What are the types of folders present in Cognos?
There are three main types of folders and they are listed below:
•Standard folder
•Package folder
•Metrics folder
37. What do you mean by drill across?
The drill across executes queries with the help of more than one cube.
38. What are all the types of hierarchies?
There are two types of hierarchies:
•Attribute hierarchies
•User defined hierarchies
39. What is the use of Cognos decision stream?
Cognos decision stream is set to be a tool which is used for extracting, transforming the data from different data sources to target data source.
40. What are the themes in a data warehouse?
The three important fundamental themes are:
•Drilling Down
•Drilling Across
•Handling Time
41. What do you mean by Drill down and Drill Up?
Drill down is addition of grouping columns from the dimension tables whereas drill up is removing grouping columns from the dimension tables.
42. What is the advantage of using shortcuts?
There are two shortcuts – Local and Global. Local is used for the local repository and Global for global repository. Advantage is to reuse an object instead of creating multiple objects.
43. What is called materialized view?
A materialized view is a view which is physically stored in a database. This view is used to increase query performance by calculating costly operations.
