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You are here: Home / Proven Practices / Modeling / Automating Cube Build in IBM Cognos Transformer 10
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IBM Cognos PowerPlay cubes are one of the most widely used OLAP data sources in the IBM Cognos environment. Typically, a PowerCube contains calculated and aggregated data that is organized as dimensions and measures, which can be viewed and analyzed in PowerPlay or Cognos BI (versions 8 or 10). Easy to use and fast access to pre-calculated summary data provides users with the ability to perform quick analysis. Since data stored in an IBM Cognos PowerCube is static, building a PowerCube naturally becomes a repetitive process. Often times cube data is refreshed on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Depending on data volume and the number of dimensions and measures in the cube, the build process can sometimes take hours to complete. In order to ensure the most benefit from the cube, having a scheduled and automated cube build is essential. As many of you know, automated cube building can be easily achieved using Transformer command line options along with a scripting language of your choice. However, prior to the IBM Cognos 8.4 release, deploying the newly refreshed cube file wasnt an easy process. It relied on an external utility to update your IBM Cognos data source connections to use the newly built cube. Today, I will show you a much easier approach that leverages new features in Transformer 10 to enable automated cube building and deployment with just a few easy steps. Case Studies (3) Events (46) Training (17) Newsletter (155) Press Releases (15) Proven Practices (85) Development (10) Infrastructure (20) Modeling (18) Performance (3) Report Studio Cookbook (8) Reporting (38) The general syntax for using command line options with optional arguments is as follows: cogtroption[argument] filename.py?|filename.mdl A few things to consider: On Windows, you can use -n with some options to run Cognos Transformer in batch mode. The option in the command line always starts with a dash (-). Command line options are case-insensitive. Arguments are case-sensitive. You must enclose the argument in double quotation marks if there are spaces inside any argument, for example: cogtr -n mc:\cube model\ Field3.mdl For .py? files, the question mark (?) is replaced by the character that is used in the version of Cognos Transformer, i.e. .pyj or pyi file. You can use more than one option in a command line. If an option that is used in a command line is incompatible with an option that appears earlier in the command line, the earlier option is ignored. Security (4)
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When entering command line options, you must specify the name of the .mdl or .py? file at the end of the command line after all the other parameters, for example: cogtr -n -s -mmodel.mdl cogtr -n -s -pmodel.py? For more information about command line options, please review the Transformer User Guide .
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Note: Replace the cube name with the actual cube name and location of your .mdl file. Notice that after the cube build completes, Transformer has automatically deployed and activated the newly generated cube. It doesnt require any changes to the data source connection. The live cube swap is effective immediately. Thats it! With just a few more steps (depending on your environment), you can now schedule the cube build via a job scheduler application, such as Windows Scheduled Tasks. You will not need to manually rebuild or deploy the cube any more as everything will be done automatically on schedule. If you have any questions about automating cube build in your environment, please contact the Ironside Group for more information. We offer packaged solutions for Transformer Automation coupled with our proven Transformer deployment methodology that includes an intelligent scripting suite with the following features and capabilities: Support for multi-server IBM Cognos environments. Change management without modifying Transformer models within your lifecycle. Custom e-mail notification for both users and administrators. Detailed logging to file and database for reporting on cube builds from within Cognos. Trigger builds from ETL processes on other servers. Trigger report execution when cube builds complete. Source code is provided for easy customization to meet your organizations specific requirements and infrastructure.
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Filed Under: Modeling, Newsletter, Proven Practices Play, IBM Cognos Transformer, OLAP, PowerCube
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calvin clack says: August 29, 2012 at 2:12 PM
susan, thanks for the tip. hi to ralph baker.
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