WHAT IS COGNOS ?

Cognos, an IBM company, is the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions. It provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. Cognos was acquired by IBM in January 2008.

Cognos 8 BI ensures accurate reporting and handling of numeric data. The numbers have to add up in the day-to-day processes in a scope that Excel cannot cover.

Reporting is both open and transparent, which makes decision-making knowledge-based, facilitates data management, and transforms the ‘I think’ into ‘I know’ statements.

The main drawback is query performance, a highly normalized model will lead to dozens of tables in a single SQL statement, leading to large execution plans and potentially slow performance.

Relational data sources also pose a number of modelling challenges for the framework modeller to create predictable query results.

But then it can be solved by using a dimensionally modelled database for querying.

My Take :-

Very amazing and programmer friendly.

The code hardly needs any changes.

And as it is open reporting, any changes made at the code level, will not effect upgradations in anyways (unlike SAP etc)

UI can be made as catchy and presentable as possible.