INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Reporting and OLAP Cubes: Together at Last

Apr. 19, 2006

As a technology, analysis (or OLAP) may be hard to improve. Few others deliver as many benefits to the business. OLAP can analyze trends, reveal relationships, and offer multiple views on performance, all in a fraction of a second. But because deployments are often limited to a subset of users within an organization,¹ its promise is only partially fulfilled – a lot of potential users don't gain the benefits.

Extending the benefits of OLAP through enterprise reporting may be a simple and cost-effective solution.

Reporting and analysis often work in silos

Reporting and analysis are the cornerstones of an enterprise BI strategy. Most companies have both, but rarely do they work well together. Reporting systems can't directly leverage OLAP data. OLAP doesn't provide the scalability to support broad distribution. Inconsistent metadata models cause integration headaches.

And so users are left to shuttle back and forth between applications or work with an incomplete picture of their performance. With the number of BI users in an organization on the rise, the goal for IT is to find a product that can leverage OLAP sources without the need for retooling, duplicating metadata, or other work-arounds.

Bring them together for better leverage

The reporting capabilities of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence provides the answer by delivering both reporting and OLAP capabilities (among others) within a single product. Cognos 8 BI provides managed and production reporting that directly leverages the business information stored in Cognos PowerCubes®. It also provides native access and extended feature support for other OLAP sources, including:

IBM DB2 OLAP: substitution variables, member properties
SAP BW: multi-currency variables, alternative hierarchies, InfoQuery, InfoCube, Multi-Provider, RemoteCube
Essbase: substitution variables, member properties
Microsoft SSAS: attributes, named sets, actions

IBM Cognos 8 BI also features aggregate and hierarchical awareness of relational data (ROLAP).

Reporting provides broad distribution

In addition, the scalable, Web services-based, services-oriented architecture of Cognos 8 BI connects the data across multiple departments. The result is broader consumption of critical business information and better decision-making.

"The feature of IBM Cognos 8 BI that we're most excited about is the options that we have around using Cognos Power Cubes as a data source directly with Reporting," says Rebecca Wilson, Director of Enterprise Reporting at Tyson Foods. "Using the cubes as data will afford us quite a bit of flexibility around serving up data dynamically and quickly in our environment."

The best of both worlds

The benefits of this combination go beyond broad distribution. When connected to an OLAP data source, IBM Cognos 8 BI automatically leverages the inherent hierarchical information that is normally found in these data sources. For users, this means report objects that had been static are now dynamic and multidimensional. Users can drill up and down on chart objects and crosstabs to understand an issue in greater context. IT can generate reports from one or more cubes to provide complete information.

Powerful new chart types and data-driven captioning

Report from multiple data sources. Build gauge charts and integrate maps with data-driven color coding.

Self-service reporting

Like OLAP, reporting delivers greater value when people outside of IT find it easy to use. Rapid user adoption reduces the IT workload and business users become more productive more quickly. Again, IBM Cognos 8 BI fits the bill.

IBM Cognos 8 BI doesn't demand that users know database hierarchies or programming languages. Instead, an intuitive Web browser interface presents in familiar business terms and lets users view information the way they want. With simple drag-and-drop actions, users can create dashboards and reports that integrate content from one or multiple OLAP sources. And any number of sophisticated objects and visual elements-crosstabs, maps, graphs, images, and bar charts-can be added to create high-fidelity formatting and layouts.

The reporting architecture is highly efficient. It has proven scalability to hundreds of thousands of users. To speed access to information, scheduling, bursting, emailing, and version management capabilities get the reports out to lots of consumers, across the building, or around the globe.

Sharing data

Common metadata allows applications to successfully share data. It's especially important when people need to work with complex, dimensional hierarchies within a cube. Without consistent metadata, IT has to spend time correlating information and resolving incompatibilities.

IBM Cognos 8 BI provides a single metadata model that applies consistent business rules, hierarchies, dimensions, and calculations to all data. This creates a complete and consistent view of all data, including OLAP sources. Everyone works with the same data, definitions, and results, whether they're authoring reports or viewing them.

Adding value without modification

A BI application that integrates with an existing infrastructure can be deployed more quickly and helps maximize investment. Moreover, it minimizes administration and maintenance costs.

IBM Cognos 8 BI reporting is simple to implement. The single Web services-based architecture works with existing servers, portals, browsers, applications, platforms, databases, and security models. Further, it supports Windows, Unix, and Linux operating systems in uniform and mixed platform deployments.

In terms of OLAP, Cognos provides the enterprise-wide reporting layer atop the data. It extends the business information out to more people, adding significant value to existing investments without the need to migrate or change them.

A single OLAP cube can answer thousands of business questions. With the reach of enterprise reporting, companies have the opportunity to multiply the benefit and achieve a broader level of informed decision-making.