Cognos 8 Platform

The IBM Cognos 8 platform helps data professionals access their complete enterprise data resources to deliver reliable, consistent and timely data for reporting, planning and other performance management capabilities.

The Cognos 8 performance management platform gives you:

• Complete access to data wherever it resides
• Flexible data sourcing
• Optimized access for faster performance

Complete access to data wherever it resides

The Cognos 8 platform lets you access all data regardless of its source or structure while insulating business users and metadata modelers from its complexity. The single query service provides predictable and consistent results across all your capabilities while simplifying management and maintenance for IT.

• Native interfaces to many data sources; certified interfaces to SAP R/3 and salesforce.com.
• Access relational data sources using industry-standard SQL99 converted to native SQL.
• Optimized access to Cognos OLAP, SAP BW and other third-party data OLAP sources.
• Access modern data sources including XML and collaboration sources.
• Change single query service handles requests for the broad range of capabilities, issuing either MDX or SQL as needed.

Flexible data sourcing

The Cognos 8 platform gives IT the flexibility to combine data sources or change sourcing strategies over time without disrupting the user experience.

• Direct access: Enables immediate access to your existing data integration and management technologies and provides users with access to existing data sources.
• High-performance federated access: Combines data from multiple sources on the fly to create virtual views from current and historic data as a single, easy-to-query view.
• Dimensional ETL (Cognos 8 Data Manager): For high-performance transformations and a dimensional framework that automates management of slowly changing dimensions, late arriving facts, surrogate key management, balancing, flattening and recursive hierarchy support.
• Integration with third-party tools: Includes IBM InfoSphere Information Server and DataStage, Informatica PowerCenter and change data capture (CDC) technologies such as IBM InfoSphere Change Data Capture.

Optimized access for faster performance

Deliver information to business users quickly and efficiently without impacting the performance of your source systems.

• Multi-dimensional cube builder lets IT and business analysts re-shape data without the need for costly and time-consuming changes to back-end systems.
• Build new OLAP cubes quickly using existing data, queries or reports.
• Business analysts can publish new OLAP cubes directly into the Cognos environment without IT intervention.
• Virtual caching lets IT reduce the load on the source systems by re-using existing views and caching data to a disk or database.