Cognos Query

IBM® Cognos® Query lets Web users access relational data to make key business decisions. With the ability to access and share timely information, such as customer orders, supplier lists and inventory levels, organizations gain the insight necessary to compete in today’s economy.

Features and benefits for users

• The right answers, fast: IBM Cognos Query helps users quickly and easily access data about their business processes. For example, an organization can gauge the success of a Web marketing campaign according to the number of Web hits received last month, last week or even today.
• Easy-to-use Web browser interface: Users can access the ad hoc functionality of IBM Cognos Query without installing or configuring anything on their desktop system. A Web browser is all that is needed.
• Flexible query creation or modification: The Query Design Wizard helps end-users create a query. It quickly and easily guides users through columns and layout options, assists them in creating calculations, and helps filter or group data. It can also allow modifications to pre-authored queries—which saves the user from starting from scratch.
• Rich query functionality: IBM Cognos Query offers general functionality such as formatting, filtering, sorting, grouping and summarizing. More sophisticated querying is handled by advanced functionality including charting, prompting, query linking, expression editing and calculations.

Features and benefits for IT

• Easy to upgrade and maintain: The zero-footprint, HTML-only Web client means anyone with a browser—including extranet users—can create and execute queries. IT does not have to install, configure or support custom software on desktops, and users do not have to download plug-ins or Java® applets. This means no desktop installations, configurations, maintenance or upgrades are necessary.
• Complete enterprise scalability: A distributed architecture enables IBM Cognos Query to balance the load of query requests across multiple query processes. Failover protection ensures that a query request is never lost.
• Convenient high performance server-based solution: With IBM Cognos Query, all query processing is done at the server level, which means IT can ensure the highest performance for users. Application changes are also done at the server level, meaning modifications and upgrades are instantly available to users without the need for desktop deployment.
• Queries spanning multiple databases: Since IBM Cognos Series 7 offers shared metadata for all BI tools, users can design a single query that draws on data from multiple sources. This means that IT does not have to design an intermediary program to convert differing data sources into one usable language for reporting and analysis.