Thursday, February 2, 2012

Take better business decisions using External / Personalized data in Cognos 10

Ever thought of supplementing enterprise data with your own or personal data file? This will allow you to create a report using an external file that contains data which is not a part of the enterprise data that your Business Intelligence tool regularly accesses. With IBM Cognos 10 BI you can link this type of scenario data with enterprise data and create a professional report easily.

The following types of files can be used:
  • Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (.xls files)
  • Tab-delemeted files (.txt files)
  • Comma-separated files (.csv files)
  • XML data (.xml files)
To work with external data the administrator should first grant the permission Allow External Data capability (under the Report Studio capability) to report authors considering the report authors can already access Report Studio and Business Insight Advanced (you cannot use external data in Business Insight).

Before importing external data, the report author should start with an existing Cognos package. Then, the report author will have to import the external data file and link the columns in the external data file to those of the enterprise data (this can be a relational or dimensional data source). As a next step, the report authors need to publish a new package that enables the users to create reports using both external data and enterprise data.

Here is a video that explains the process of using external data in IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio:

1 comment:

  1. Hi Rajib, Thanks for this great post. At this moment I have this need ... to get an Excel file and loaded in Report Studio but when i do so it didn’t bring to me all the data in the file, just the first row. Maybe this is explain in detail in the video but i can’t see it, could you please explain a little bit more? Thanks in advance.

    Jaime Garzon.

    ReplyDelete