During my Cognos Certification with IBM, I met several consultants that integrate Cognos with customer environments. They often get requests to support data sources without an out-of-box ODBC driver such as application data, proprietary databases, flat files, services, data in a cloud, VSAM, etc. My answer was always, “yep, we got that”. They were really excited about this for obvious reasons and it helps that Cognos engineering certifies the same technology on Unix/Linux platforms for SQL Server connectivity. And if you’re looking to boost performance to existing data sources, you can evaluate the industry leading suite of ODBC drivers to data sources such as DB2, Sybase, Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, Informix, Teradata, and Salesforce Cloud. And just around the corner, you can expect to see support expanded for Cognos data sources in Sybase IQ and Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW).
Progress DataDirect OpenAccess SDK opens up Cognos to report in real-time against anything you can think of via ODBC. Or if you are building a data warehouse, you can access the data through any ETL application using ODBC, JDBC, .NET, or OLEDB drivers. Each client driver works with the same set of 12 functions you write in the interface provider (IP), and we take care of the rest.
This tutorial will show you how to start building your metadata model using Framework Manager against the out-of-box memory sample driver built using the DataDirect OpenAccess SDK.
The preliminary steps are:
1. Assume Cognos BI Environment (v8.4.1) with Framework Manager is installed.
2 . Install Progress DataDirect OpenAccess SDK using the instructions in the Progress DataDirect OpenAccess SDK Installation Guide. You can download a free, 15-day trial: http://www.datadirect.com/product-downloads/sdk_eval.html
3. Setup ODBC data source named “oalocal603” to Memory Sample driver installed with SDK. The memory sample driver models various tables and fetches data from memory to demonstrate core functionality of the Data Access SDK.
Launch Cognos Framework Manager and Create a New Project. Then run the metadata wizard.
Select “New” data source
Enter name of Data Source stored in content manager. This can be anything you want.
Select data source type as “ODBC”
Enter name of ODBC DSN configured for memory sample and test-connect. The default password for the memory data source is pooh/bear.
Select the new data source created in Cognos above.
Click next, finish, and select the metadata objects you wish to import.
Viola, you have connected Cognos to a custom data source.
Now you can start building your metadata models and presentation layers for your BI report developers!!
Once you have established that the custom memory ODBC driver works and meets your project requirements, you can start writing your 12 functions in any language to access whatever data source you want to include in your reporting. And once you’ve built the driver, you can then access ANY standards based application such as Oracle Database Gateway for ODBC (Dg4ODBC), Ab Initio, SSIS, Informatica, Crystal Reports, SAS, Teradata Parallel Transporter (TPT), Business Objects Universe, etc.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Very interesting indeed. Does your SDK driver require the IBM Cognos SDK be installed?
Good question, no, drivers built with the OpenAccess SDK work like any other supported ODBC driver; and are completely independent of the IBM Cognos SDK.
Nice writeup! I have been trying to prototype something similar with internal application data using the Virtual View Manager, but it looks like your solution will save a lot of time/effort!
Hi Sumit,
thanks for your post i have one question for this we have to create any variables can you post steps.
Rakesh, There is nothing additional required to do in Cognos versus any other data source. Is there a specific component of Cogos you are asking about? Feel free to give me a call at 800-876-3101.
hi, how can we get source data to our system from client in real time projects. can u give me brief explanation for this. Its very important to me now.
My Cognos is installed on Linux servers. There is only JDBC on them.
So, do you have drivers for generic data source configuration on Linux?
Do we still use the ODBC driver set for FM?
@Sri – The JDBC drivers are for integration with the content repository whereas ODBC drivers access the physical data for both Framework Manager (Windows) and Cognos BI Server (Linux). Feel free to call me at 1-888-332-6797 if you have further questions.
Hi Sumit! I don’t have an IT background so forgive me but are you basically saying that with Progress DataDirect OpenAccess SDK I can have custom data in my SQL Server and have that serve as a data source. CostPoint has our actual data and I’m putting forecast data on SQL Server – now I need to find a way to create cognos reports that merge actual with forecast data, both of which are on separate data sources.