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Cognos

Cognos 11.1.3 Overview

July 9, 2019 by Ryan Dolley 2 Comments

The quarterly(ish) IBM Cognos release schedule marches into Summer 2019 with a bundle of fresh analytics goodness for all you Cognoids out there. In this Cognos 11.1.3 overview I’ll focus on the headline features – mostly in the form of enhancements to the Explore and AI Assistant capabilities introduced in the 11.1.1 release. The full release notes can be found here.

The AI Assistant Levels Up

The AI Assistant gets a major upgrade in Cognos 11.1.3 via the introduction of a host of new NLQ capabilities. Previous versions restricted text references to column titles only with no ability to filter or aggregate via natural language. For example, ‘show sales by year’ would generate a simple column chart, while ‘show sales for 2017’ would result in a ‘huh?’ and ‘show average sales for country by year excluding 2015’ would catch your server farm on fire. No longer! Let’s take a look at a few possibilities using the American Time Use Survey data set that you’ve undoubtedly seen me demo over the years.

Natural Language Query Aggregation

The AI assistant can now handle aggregation, as you can see below. I typed ‘show average weekly earnings by age range and education level’ and Cognos was able to apply an average and generate the example visualization with zero additional input or modeling of any kind. Pretty cool – who let Watson in the building?

Cognos 11.1.3 overview Watson
Ask and ye shall receive… aggregations!

Natural Language Query Filtering

You can also apply filters simply by typing. In the example below, ‘show top 10 average weekly earnings by education level and age range’ generates exactly what I asked for. If I like it, I can drag-and-drop into my dashboard canvas and combine it with other visualizations.

Cognos AI Assistant filters
Finally, a machine that really gets me!

Let’s break down what Cognos did here:

  • Applied an average aggregation to weekly earnings
  • Returned results for average weekly earnings by the combination of age range and education level
  • Filtered the results to only include the top 10
  • Generated 11(!) visualization options based on the above (each dot under the column chart represents a different visualization)
  • All without manual modeling, filtering, calculating or visualizing on my part.

A Dashboard from the Machine

For those of us who need things to be really, truly simple Cognos 11.1.3 offers the an out-of-the-box AI driven personal dashboard assistant. Observe what happens when you simply type ‘create dashboard!’

Cognos 11.1.3 overview automatic dashboard
One phrase, a million possibilities…

That’s right, Cognos built an entire three tab dashboard automatically with a few keystrokes. The visualizations above are 100% interactive and customizable and include advanced types like a multi-factor predictive analysis.

Explore Enhancements

The Explore feature received a small bundle of improvements designed to make it easier to use. Many of my customers seem to view Explore as a feature for data scientists or extremely advanced analysts. This couldn’t be further from the truth – while it does provide access to some more ‘data sciency’ features, it’s ability to automatically suggest related visualizations and generate insightful English language descriptions of relationships in the data make it extremely useful for regular self service users. If you don’t believe me, gimme a call and we can work it out. I’ll jump off my soapbox now…

Relationships Automatically Uncovered

Explore makes it easy to see the relationships between fields in your data set regardless of whether you’re viewing an excel file or a SQl server data warehouse. In this release, you gain the ability to filter those relationships for strength to focus on only the most important ones as well as a redesign to make it easier to read. You can see below how I’ve chosen to focus on the primary relationships between Weekly Earnings and other fields in the data set while filtering out anything with a relationship strength below 10%. If I want to instead see those same parameters applied to Weekly Hours Worked or Television, I could simply click on them.

Cognos 11.1.3 overview explore
See how everything relates in your data

Interactive Visualization Comparisons

The ability to interactively compare visualizations has been in Cognos since 11.1.1 but was so well hidden that I often neglected to show it in demos as there was no great way to transition to it. They’ve surfaced it in the UI for this release and made it much easier to use. You can see below how I compare average weekly earnings by education for men vs women side by side, complete with English language descriptions of the data generated by Cognos.

Cognos explore visualization compare
Easy side by side visualization comparisons

Cognos 11.1.3 Overview Quick Hits

Those represent some of the more forward looking changes in Cognos 11.1.3, however there are some great bread-and-butter additions I’ll rapid fire for you now.

Reporting Updates

A few updates to reporting in this release – nothing major, but nice functionality nonetheless. First up, they redid the custom filter UI so that it’s easier to create explicit (individual) or conditional filters.

Next, they have added a report overview that gives you some nice information about what is contained in the report. It doesn’t offer a ton in the way of functionality at this point but it does let you clear param values from the report which is pretty useful.

The report overview page gets a makeover

Share via Email

One of the most requested features I see, Cognos can how share a report directly via email, complete with an annotated image of the report. Pretty cool!

Cognos 11.1.3 overview share via email

Prettier Maps

Maps were updated to look better. And they do!

Cognos 11.1.3 overview of new mapping capabilities
If you’re in Iceland and need Cognos expertise, please call me!

Drill-Through from 11.1 Visualizations

The 11.1 release brought new visualizations that have a host of awesome features, like browser-side rendering and more customization. They did not, however, include the ability to drill-through. Ya know, that little feature invented when I was in high school. That’s been fixed in 11.1.3.

Overall Impressions

That’s about wraps up the Blueview Cognos 11.1.3 overview. There are other improvements that I haven’t covered, most of which are nice quality of life enhancements. Some will be disappointed with the somewhat narrow scope of changes in this release, however I think things like the ability to share directly via email will be looked back on as a huge plus. While I don’t have any insider information (I swear…), I expect a larger release during or shortly after IBM Data and AI Forum in October. In the meantime, give me a call if you’d like to discuss the upgrade to 11.1.3.

Cognos 11.1 Overview

March 18, 2019 by Ryan Dolley Leave a Comment

I don’t think I’m underselling it to say that the 11.1 release is crucial to IBM and the future of Cognos Analytics. Luckily the hardworking folks up in Ottawa appear to have delivered. In this quick Cognos 11.1 overview I’ll cover the major new features of the release. Also, look forward to a full review of Cognos 11.1 and some guidance on how to modernize your Cognos deployment in the coming weeks.

Reporting

Reporting updates center on improving the user experience by redesigning navigation and automating the most common layout tasks with drag-and-drop formatting. These enhancements make report creation significantly easier for novice and advanced authors alike while retaining the pixel-perfect flexibility that Cognos professionals demand.

  • Dynamic Layout makes layout building, object resizing and styling into an easy drag-and-drop process
  • Redesigned breadcrumb-based navigation is much improved
  • Lock the dynamic toolbar to the top of the reporting screen for easier interaction
  • Style building allows you to easily create and re-use style properties across reports
  • Client-side visualizations improve performance, interactivity for report users
    • Data is retrieved from the database and stored client side – no more re-query for every filter change
    • Contextual data can be added to a visualization, which allows more advanced filters.
The new breadcrumb navigation structure is a breath of fresh air.

Dashboards

Dashboards receive a ton of attention in Cognos Analytics 11.1, knocking off many of the most requested enhancements, greatly improving customizability and integrating new AI and advanced analytics capabilities. These changes turn what was already a very capable self-service data discovery and visualization suite into a powerful, easy to use AI enhanced insight engine that end users will love.

  • Custom color palettes!
  • New ‘insights’ capability automatically highlights outliers, shows average values and other interesting statistical information
  • Upgraded layout options, such as absolute or relative positioning and snap to grid or object.
  • New visualizations including:
    • Bullet chart
    • Decision Tree
    • Driver analysis
    • Marimekko
  • Enhanced visualization customization, including ability to change fonts and axis labels
  • Enhance integration with Stories & improved Stories features
  • Individual visualization data available in data tray
  • Share visualizations or whole dashboards directly to Slack
Dashboard insights give you instantaneous statistical analysis at a single click!

Data Modeling

Cognos Analytics 11.1 significantly modernizes and enhances the Data Modules, Data Sets and uploaded file capabilities of Cognos, with a focus on making data management easier and more performant. Data Modules in particular receive a host of data modeling and blending features that meet or exceed the capabilities of Framework Manager in almost every respect.

  • Data Module enhancements:
    • New expression editor including comment formatting, type-ahead functions
    • Create table copies, views, joined views, unions, intersects and excepts
    • Create tables using SQL
    • Set data level security
    • Set table cache parameters to improve performance
    • Set ‘column dependency’ to handle multi-fact grain mismatch
    • Overwrite default column formats
    • Split columns
    • Create relative time calculations (see Relative Time for more info)
  • Data Set enhancements:
    • New data set query processing engine improves performance
  • Uploaded File enhancements:
    • New uploaded file query processing engine improves performance
    • Support for multi-tab spreadsheets
    • Ability to append or replace uploaded files
    • New upload interface

Admin and Architecture Changes

Admin changes for Cognos Analytics 11.1 focus on two areas: Migrating functionality from the Cognos 10 Administration screen to the Cognos 11 Manage menu, and adding new administration functionality. These enhancements make Cognos easier to govern and provide features like user and distribution list management that used to require outside software.

  • Ability to define palettes via Manage menu and use them in ANY Cognos studio
  • Create distribution lists directly within Cognos
  • Redesigned job interface
  • Simplified routing rule management

AI Assistant

The AI assistant is one of the major new features of Cognos 11.1. accessible from Dashboards and Explorations, the AI assistant provides a chat-based exploration experience designed to quickly uncover relationships and statistical anomalies within data and automatically build visualizations for use in Cognos.

  • Search Cognos for data related to specific topics
  • Receive descriptive and statistical information about columns within data sources
  • Uncover what drives the values of any individual column
  • Automatically visualize via text input
The new AI assistant makes interacting with Cognos easier than ever!

Explore

Explore, the most exciting new feature of Cognos Analytics 11.1, brings the automatic insights, easy visualization and natural language query capabilities of the now deprecated Watson Analytics into Cognos. A new Exploration will automatically suggest starting points for analysis, visualize relationships in your data, provide key driver analysis and surface interesting visualizations.

  • Relationship model highlights connections between fields in the data
  • Suggested starting points make analysis easy
  • Key driver analysis uncovers the factors that influence important fields
  • System generated text describe underlying insights in the data
  • Related visualizations surfaced based on statistics and likely value
  • Comparison cards narrate the difference between any two visualizations
  • Export insight to Cognos Analytics Dashboards
Explore provides all those juicy Watson Analytics capabilities in a cozy Cognos wrapper.

Conclusion

I hope this Cognos 11.1 overview has been helpful, and I hope you’re impressed with what you’ve seen so far – though I’ve only scratched the surface here. If you’re struggling to understand how to implement these new features, I’ve got a post coming up next week that will help. And as always, reach out to me directly with any questions!

Cognos?! Who Needs Cognos When You’ve Got a Watson!

March 29, 2015 by Ryan Dolley Leave a Comment

NOTE: This diatribe was originally posted January 29th, 2015 at my old blogger domain. Since then I have in fact gotten a demonstration of Watson Analytics in the hands of a highly skilled presenter and was fairly impressed with the tool. IBM still needs to outline their vision for the integration of Watson into Cognos but you can fairly say of this post: “Foot, prepare to meet Mr. Mouth…”

 

IBM held a webinar today (January 29th, 2015) titled “IBM Watson Analytics for IBM Cognos Users. Here is my run down of what Big Blue had to show:

  • Watson is an unstoppable beast… in slide decks: Every time I see a Watson presentation the visualizations look great and the marketing speak makes it sound like a game changer. However I have yet to see an actual demonstration of the damn thing.
  • Cognos sure sounds boring: IBM gets positively tired whenever the conversation shifts to Cognos. You can tell how unexcited they are to sell things like “trusted source of data.” Who needs trust when you’ve got a sweet graph!
  • The Watson – Cognos integration does not exist: As per the slide deck, the current integration point between the two is that you take what you learned in Watson and send an email to someone in IT asking them to change something in Cognos to match your new insight. Awesome.

I had high(er) hopes for this presentation. Given the title I was expecting to see IBM’s vision for how Watson and Cognos exist in an analytics ecosystem, or at least an outline of some integration points between the two. IBM had nothing to say about Cognos though other than to acknowledge its existence, which… whatever. Just another wasted opportunity from Big Blue so par for the course.

More than anything I’d like them to actually demonstrate Watson in the hands of a highly skilled presenter. Because, as you’ll see in a future post, my experience with the Watson “freemium edition” is less than stellar…

Cognos 64-bit Reporting and When to Use It

March 17, 2015 by Ryan Dolley 3 Comments

I discussed in an earlier post the misconception that 32-bit Cognos application servers cannot execute 64-bit Cognos queries when in fact they can. This means that for most Cognos customers leaving the report service execution mode set to 32-bit is a smart move; existing 32-bit CQE content will work alongside 64-bit DQM content and you do not have to set up advanced routing rules to prevent 32-bit queries from hitting a 64-bit server. There are three cases in which I recommend deviating from this path:

  • You have extremely visual reports: When a query comes in that requires DQM your 32-bit Report Service will hand it off to the 64-bit Query Service to build and execute the query plan. The Query Service will pass the result set back to the Report Service to generate the report and everyone wins. If, however, your reports are extremely visually complicated the 32-bit Report Service can still serve as a bottleneck as it is restricted by the old-school RAM limitations of 32-bit processes. Routing this report to a 64-bit DQM server will resolve this problem.
  • You are making the leap to Dynamic Cubes:  This one is more of a preference than a hard-and-fast rule, but if you intend to realize the ridiculous performance gains that come with Dynamic Cubes I highly suggest you quarantine them to a 64-bit only server and route all Dynamic Cube traffic to that server. This will simplify troubleshooting and performance tuning for your cubes and secure your CQE queries against disruption. It also gives you a 64-bit landing place as you migrate legacy queries to DQM.
  • You are a new Cognos customer: If you are reading this having just inked your five year enterprise licensing agreement with IBM, you need to ensure that you are only building and developing in DQM. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this point. I have it on very good authority that CQE will receive only bug-fixes going forward and that future versions of Cognos will execute CQE queries but all new development will be DQM only. Do not devote a single second to learning about or developing CQE content!

So there you have it!  If you are an existing Cognos customer you should feel fine leaving the report service execution mode on 32-bit and riding those CQE queries as long as you can. I recommend standing up a 64-bit DQM server only if you run into performance issues caused by the 32-bit report service for the time being.

Everyone needs to be planning a migration to 64-bit only, however. Dynamic Cubes are a great reason to start but the fact is that 64 bit Cognos is the future, and the future may be much closer than you think…

Yes that ending was intentionally cryptic. Not sure how much I can talk about yet… 😉

64-bit vs 32-bit Ain’t Just for Playstation and Nintendo

March 17, 2015 by Ryan Dolley 1 Comment

Redditor Aybabtu123 on the IBM Cognos subreddit asks:

“I’m putting together a 10.2.2 sandbox environment and I’d like to enable dynamic query mode on it. Is it true that all datasources must be 64 bit for this?”

This is a great question and one that IBM frequently discusses in a way that is clear as mud, so here is the answer as succinctly as I can phrase it. Assuming a 64-bit installation of Cognos on a 64-bit server with a 64-bit OS…

  • With the Report Server Execution mode in Cognos Configuration set to 32-bit, queries routed to this server will execute in either CQE or DQM depending on how the datasource and package have been defined.
  • With the Report Server Execution mode in Cognos Configuration set to 64-bit, queries routed to this server will only execute in DQM. CQE queries will error out.

Cognos 64-bit option
Where the magic happens

Cognos is automatically set to 32-bit Report Server Execution upon installation, so as long as you don’t change it your application servers will be able to execute both 32-bit (CQE) and 64-bit (DQM) queries – and by extension utilize both CQE and DQM datasources.

Tomorrow (or soon anyway) we’ll discuss what situations would warrant switching to a 64-bit only application server and the steps you need to take to properly route traffic. I’ll give you a big hint though, and it rhymes with crynamic dubes.

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