IBM Cognos Dynamic Cubes

4 IBM Cognos Dynamic Cubes

1.1.2 Enterprise data warehouses for analytics

Data warehouses are the recognized foundation for enterprise analytics. They enable an

organization to bring together cleansed data from separate sources of input, both internal and

external, such as from partners or suppliers. Instead of

garbage in, garbage out information

to support decision-making, a consistent and consolidated enterprise-wide view of data from

a business provides the foundation to improve your business. Building upon a trusted

information platform for analytics is a key contributor to long-term business health. Not only

do data warehouses enable higher quality information, they are designed to enable

high-performance data access for analytic style applications.

Cognos Dynamic Cubes technology helps to leverage the core strengths of an EDW and take

the EDW to the next level of performance for analytics, while making the deploying and tuning

easier and faster.

1.1.3 Data volumes and context in the Enterprise Data Warehouse

With social data generating petabytes per day, and instrumented devices becoming the norm,

data volume growth is accelerating at an unprecedented pace.

Big data is a growing business trend, with data from unconventional sources having the

potential to be business disrupters. However, before the power of these new sources can be

fully used, we must understand what is happening within our own business. Understanding

your own business is added value of a data warehouse, and why taking full advantage of

these data holdings is a critical first step to using these new sources of data.

In addition, any organization that relies on instrumented infrastructures has an opportunity to

maximize the efficiency of its operations. Analytics is key to accomplishing this type of

optimization, leading to concrete business results.

With data volumes exploding, and growing urgency to make sense of this sea of data, using a

data warehouse technology, and maintaining a connection to the data warehouse from your

analysis tools helps to rationalize investments.

Easy visibility into enterprise data is a critical step on the journey to insight from various

sources, traditional and emerging. Semi-structured or unstructured data will only make sense

within the context of your business. Your data warehouse contains this context.

1.1.4 Architecture summary

The Cognos Dynamic Cubes technology is part of the IBM Cognos BI query stack, and is

available with existing IBM Cognos entitlements. It provides a new and powerful tool to enable

high performance analytics over large data warehouses.

Cognos Dynamic Cubes solution consists of a modeling tool (IBM Cognos Cube Designer), a

dynamic cube object in the administration environment, which becomes the data source, and

a wizard (Aggregate Advisor), launched from Dynamic Query Analyzer:

򐂰 IBM Cognos Cube Designer

Cognos Cube Designer is a modeling tool that brings together best modeling principles

from past successful modeling technology, with a modern and extensible architecture. The

first step to deploying Cognos Dynamic Cubes is to model with the Cognos Cube

Designer.