Applied Dimensionality

We’re about 70% done in the project that took 110% of my time lately and it’s all about using Cognos BI on top of TM1 (with a bit of DWH in Cognos DataManager,  that’ll be a separate post). Good time to write down some notes on how to develop efficient reports with TM1 as a data source.

Saw people having issues with configuring SSO for CX a few times already, so it’s probably worth puting this quick tip up here.

If you followed the mighty document called “IBM Cognos Proven Practices: Enabling Kerberos SSO in IBM Cognos Express on Windows Server 2008” and Single SignOn still doesn’t work, think about how much you need Kerberos authetification. If you, as well as myself, don’t really care about enhanced security that Kerberos provides so much, you can probably use something called NTLM or REMOTE_USER for authetification. It’s less secure, but you don’t need to set up Kerberos delegation (which is a lot of tedious work & troubleshooting sometimes). Most of Cognos BI sites I know use it, cause it’s easier to set up.

Time for another multi-page dashboard related JS. It’s fairly complex (I’m not a js programmer, so am biased), works for 10.1 (and should work onwards and backwards, I don’t rely on cognos prompt syntax). The story behind it is quite simple: we’ve started doing dashboard pages as a global prompt on top and multiple report frames in the bottom. All went well up untill the point when global prompts had to change with regards to selected tab (some versions avalaible only on certain tabs, some have to be renamed, etc).

Overwhelmed with work but still alive and have some proof: a quick javascript recipe that allows you to add hyperlinks to select tabs in multi-page dashboard reports. Something like multi-page tab drill-through ) Googled around and haven’t found anything copy-ready, so here it goes.

I’ve long avoided it, but let’s try a “results & plans” post for 2012. Hoped to publish it on XMas break, then on  New Year, then on Old New Year and then just though that “done is better than good” and decided just to post it anyway.

When you’re TM1-to-the-bone and somebody says “and then we need to send these reports out” , you think ”Well, that’s easy, it’s just an Active Form and a bit of vbs to convert TM1 formulas to values, pack and send”. And it’s all nice and straight-forward journey up to the point when you hit refresh in an AF and an ”Cannot Empty Clipboard” message box pops-up. No worries if you’re refreshing something manually, just click ok and off it goes, but it’s a complete show stopper for any automated updating script (triggered by TI’s in my case). Really interested whether somebody saw the same error.

Was reading about Splunk the other day. I’ve heard about it a few years ago and recent post by Altis Consulting made me revisit their site. Basically, it’s a logs aggregator on steroids with search capabilities and nice dashboards. And it’s Big Data, heh )

Virtual machines are the greatest thing since sliced bread and most of us techies use them daily. In this post I would be talking about using Amazon EC2 as a VM hosting platform (we as a company moved everything up there over last 4 months) and as a bonus, will describe the process of converting existing VMWare Workstation images to EC2 instances.