Applied Dimensionality

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.

Most of the systems we implement don’t live in vacuum, they have to communicate with lots of neighbours. People often overlook the ability to call stored procedures from Cognos BI reports as a method of running some action, so I’d like to steal your 5 minutes for explaining how to use it to build better systems.

I’ve updated TM1 Stress \ Load Testing Tool over the weekend (vesrion 0.2, probably).

Now it handles memory a lot better and has a new parameter called seconds_between_actions in session configurations. Parameter is quite obvious, it just says how long will the coffee break between reading and writing bursts be within each session. To  make things less determined, the break is not exactly seconds_between_actions, but a random number that is less than seconds_between_actions. My coffee breaks never go for as long as I plan them, for sure.

Are you using Cognos BI seriously? Have you seen IBM SDK utilities? Keep in mind that link changes every now and then, I usually have to regoogle it. Some of them are really very good and I’ve used them a few times already. Slowly but surely, IBM is adding a few missing bits to the puzzle.

My working process these includes tossing around lots of virtual machines, so I’ve gathered a couple of tricks. Let’s talk about getting your back better (this post) and lightening your CapEx (next one).

Continuing our weekly, monthly, quarterly instalments, let’s talk about Cognos log files management.

I’m really puzzled by the fact that whenever I walk in on a clustered Cognos install, error logging is always set up just wrong!  Meaning not the way I like it :)

I was decribing the 4-year old trick of using Cognos server cluster to build powercubes and got a new idea.

Really, PowerPlay cubes building via scripts is a so 1990s, 21st century is for enterprise scale, failover, monitoring and you-know-the-pitch.

I’m playing around with some TM1 ideas and all of them require some sort of sparsity analysis. And since TM1 supports MDX (to some extent, to say it mildly) and I like MDX and used it a lot with Essbase, I thought it’d be wonderful to use MDX.