Cognos trials and tribulations – Data Modeling

Having to learn Cognos on the fly has been a challenging yet rewarding experience.  I had done some work with Crystal Reports and Microsoft SSRS in the past and this is a very different beast all together. For one in the environment for my work the Cognos server is hosted by the application provider and Cognos allows a data model to be built, and in this case I do not have direct DB2 SQL access but rather data the way the vendor has modeled it for me. In this case trying to convert from some old reports in a legacy reporting tool for the LOB to a Cognos report proves challenging. Not having direct access to the DB and field names that do not always correlate can make it difficult. Using the ‘Lineage’ tools has helped me to find what I am looking for. To access this, right click on your data object, and choose lineage.

lineage

From here you can choose the ‘Technical View’ tab and see what underlying object in the database this object was derived from.

techview

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