The extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) of data is an important aspect of any large-scale business intelligence application.

Cognos DecisionStream is designed to create dimensional data marts, and has at its core a multidimensional model. All data mart creation and reporting activities are driven from a common dimensional framework, meaning all users make decisions based on common definitions of business entities like "accounts", "customers", and "products".

DecisionStream's advanced data merging, transformation, and aggregation features bring together data from any source for the purpose of business performance management.

On top of this, DecisionStream speeds the ultimate delivery of reports to users across the organization by delivering business intelligence metadata for Cognos and 3rd-party business intelligence tools.