IBM Cognos -A detailed walkthrough

The first impression that any person gets when he first sees Cognos 10.2.1 is — ‘Wow! There’s a lot of stuff in here. How do I navigate?’. However, once you know what each stuff does, it becomes a piece of cake. I will try to break it it down to the most granular detail.

In this article, I start with explanation of the jargon, and walkthrough the cognos elements. We then try to achieve 3 objectives that serve as hands-on exercises to using Cognos. Let’s get started.

Cognos — The Jargon

Let’s first learn the jargon as not understanding tool-specific jargons might make the tool difficult to understand -

i. Query Subject — Cognos represents data in the form of tables like Excel, and certain BI tools like Tableau.

Let’s assume that your data sits in a SQL database. You run a query to fetch specific columns of the database. The results that you get are imported into Cognos as a table, and this table is called ‘Query Subject’ in the Cognos world.

ii. Query Items — Every individual column in the table is called a ‘Query Item’.

iii. FM Model — FM stands for Framework Manager. An FM model is a set/collection of tables (Query Subjects) and the corresponding columns (Query Items).

iv. Project — A collection of FM Models

v. Joins — Inner/Outer joins represent the relationship between two or more tables (Query Subjects).