COGNOS Business Intelligence Architecture

Cognos BI Architecture is a 3 Tier Architecture separated as

1. Presentation or Web Tier
2. Application Tier
3. Data Tier

3 Tier Architecture

   Presentation Tier or Web Tier provides user session connectivity to IBM Cognos BI application

  Component that fulfill this role are referred as the IBM Cognos Gateway.

  Application Tier is middle layer contains 3 main server components

•    Dispatcher
•    Report Server
•    Content Manager

  Data Tier is the lowest level in Architecture contains the Content store ,security namespace, Data Source ,OLAP Etc.

  Will Discuss this topics in detail over upcoming Articles.

Use of CAST function in Cognos Report Studio(RS).

In general cast function defines as who transforms one data type of a column to other one as defined in the function.

                     Syntax : cast (Column name ,desired_datatype(needs to define))

In report studio cast function is used to make two query item with different data type compatible with each other.

There are different scenarios when cast function is used like to convert date column or to create dummy column in UNION.

While using cast report author needs to keep in mind about the performance of report.

As any casting of query item is part of Cognos SQL rather than Native SQL,which processed at cognos server end not at database.

In case you have any question please comment ,i will respond to your query.

What is Business Intelligence(BI)?

To define business intelligence (BI) in single article is not justifiable as compare to broader area of BI. I am trying to define BI in simple words and time to time will enhance this topic.

In my words ,

Business Intelligence is combination of business concept or set of techniques along with BI tools to transform raw or unstructured data into meaningful and useful information.

There are list of business intelligence tools available major of them listed below which are available in market as standalone tools or BI suite.

• SAP Business object
• IBM Cognos
• Oracle Hyperion
• Microsoft BI Tools
• Microstrategy
• Qlik
• SAS BI

There are other tools available as open source.

Purpose of Business Intelligence is to provide business decision from range of operational to strategic.

Function which help in order to drive this decision are Reporting,Analytical processing,Analytics etc.