Reporting Services to read Cognos PowerCube?

[G.OKeefe]

Hi:

We're evaluating migration away for Cognos Series 7, and looking at our options, including Reporting Services, since we already have it implemented in another area (Customer Service, who uses it purely as a relational reporting tool against their MSSQL Server 2000 db).

What I’m trying to find out in the meantime whether we can query our existing Cognos cubes with Reporting Services, as a means of doing some demos against readily available, summarized enterprise data.

Any help you might offer would be appreciated ...

George

[Island1]

Your idea for a demo is excellent, in that it anticipates, to some extent, at least a degree of parallel testing that might be developed further , when you decide to migrate to Reporting Services. The issue with the scenario you propose is that Cognos cubes are proprietary and cannot be sourced outside a Cognos application (or an application for which Cognos has developed a "bridge," as in the case of one of their Excel add-ins), such as PowerPlay.

Replicating a PowerCube structure within Analysis Services would be relatively easy to do - at least at the high level. By that I mean assembling a rudimentary “clone” cube based upon all are part of essential set of dimensions and measures. The way I start in scenarios such as this, which I encounter frequently within piloting demonstrations and so forth (where I ultimately migrate Cognos cubes to Analysis Services within a full-blown engagement), is with a collection of all the .iqds underlying the induction side of Transformer for a given PowerPlay cube model. I then simply construct my feeder queries from the SQL therein.

Transformer's various object views / design front end are excellent to support the quick manual assembly of parallel structures within the Analysis Services design environment – one of the reasons that as droven me to work with multiple monitors / dictation software in most of my migration efforts (at least those that I support from my lab). For more “industrial strength” migrations, particularly where large number of (sophisticated) cubes, etc., are involved, I use various routines I have developed to extract and parse the associated .mdl files, and then reassemble them through the API of the respective Analysis Services environment (this process obviously differs between AS2k and AS2k5).

Let us know if you have any specific questions – I’m sure I can give you some pointers!

HTH, in good luck – you’re heading in a splendid direction!

Bill

[G.OKeefe]

Thanks, Bill. I've come across your articles in searches a thousand times. Glad to know I can access someone with your MS experience, who also knows a great deal about Cognos.

Fear not, I (and my associates, no doubt) will be in frequent touch with questions as we navigate this migration!

[Island1]

Thanks. I look forward to helping with the migration, or with any other MS BI questions or issues!

Bill