November 5, 2010 at 8:21 am
Afternoon all,
My company are reviewing where to move to Cognos 8 (or now Cognos 10) or SharePoint 2010. (we moving from Cognos 7, and it's either SharePoint or Cognos)
Anyone here had experience of both?
what are you thoughts as to which is better, more cost effective, easier to use etc etc.
All we have seem is the demos so we have very little information to draw a conclusion from.
_____________________________________________________________________________MCITP: Business Intelligence Developer (2005)
November 5, 2010 at 12:21 pm
We're actually going through the process of evaluating both right now. However, we're going with SharePoint, so the question is Reporting Services or Cognos, integrated through SharePoint, not simply Cognos or SharePoint. We're still gathering requirements. The POCs will be over the next several months. I might have a good answer for you in January... which I realize isn't helpful.
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November 8, 2010 at 3:01 am
ha ha - it actually might be! Things don't move that fast where I am.
I would certainly be very interest to hear your views on both. I'm quite intrigued as well to know how your going to integrate the two.
_____________________________________________________________________________MCITP: Business Intelligence Developer (2005)
November 10, 2010 at 11:08 am
I've used Cognos before, in particular Analysis Studio and Report Studio.
I would prefer Sharepoint above Cognos as a collaboration tool (can you have a wiki in Cognos?).
But Cognos has its strenghts as a reporting platform. I find especially the metadata framework a lot better than that of Reporting Services (but on the other hand, I don't have a lot of experience with SSRS).
Layouting a report in Cognos is hard (it doesn't really follow a logic), but if you get it right, the results can be beautiful. Another drawback is that Report Studio is used for developing relational reports and dimensional reports, which is a totally different approach in Cognos. IMO they should have two seperate tools for that.
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My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP
November 11, 2010 at 1:18 am
We've ditched Cognos for Sql Reporting Services (go for at least sql 2008 version) and we're gradually getting into Sharepoint 2007. It's very popular throughout the business as a document repository, the business manual has been published as a sharepoint web site and we're now building workflow forms and looking to make more use of it.
Report Builder 2.0 is a useful tool for the business people who want to write reports as it's more user friendly than BIDS. If you've dumped Report Builder 1.0 try 2.0 as it's a completely different thing. Haven't got sql2008R2 otherwise I'd try ReportBuilder 3.0.
November 11, 2010 at 2:19 am
thanks guys. All interesting comments to read.
Should we move to a MS solution then it's definately going to be at least SQL 2008. I am pushing however for SQL2008 R2 and if that comes off, then I use Report builder 3. It's very interesting to hear that report builder 2.0 is a big improvement of 1.0.
_____________________________________________________________________________MCITP: Business Intelligence Developer (2005)
November 11, 2010 at 2:26 am
To expand further on Cognos:
Cognos generates SQL or MDX to access the data. In collaboration with SQL Server, these system-generated scripts can ... euh ... suck.
Performance can suffer if you do not design your packages right in order to work with SSAS cubes or SQL Server database.
But, Analysis Studio has in my opinion more strength then report builder (but I haven't checked the latest version, to be honest) and the metadata framework offers more possibilities then the one in SSRS.
Need an answer? No, you need a question
My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP
November 11, 2010 at 2:59 am
we had a demo actually from one of our support suppliers and they did make a comment that there consultancy experience has seen SSAS cubes perform better than Cognos cubes. (didn't really ellaborate on whether that was query or build speed).
_____________________________________________________________________________MCITP: Business Intelligence Developer (2005)
November 11, 2010 at 3:32 am
dave-dj (11/11/2010)
we had a demo actually from one of our support suppliers and they did make a comment that there consultancy experience has seen SSAS cubes perform better than Cognos cubes. (didn't really ellaborate on whether that was query or build speed).
I'm not going to say that all Cognos reports build upon SSAS cubes are slow. Some reports we had were actually quite fast. I'm just saying we experencied some performance issues with some reports. We brought in a consultant from IBM, but even he couldn't tell why the reports were that slow. (they were even slow when the prompt page was generated. That is before the actual report is ran)
One advice: don't build a list report on a SSAS cube with Cognos, that is garantueed to be slow 🙂
Crosstabs however have good performance.
One final note: you can't build a cognos report directly on a SSAS cube. You have to wrap the cube in a cognos package so that report studio can work with it.
Need an answer? No, you need a question
My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP
November 11, 2010 at 3:42 am
OK thanks for your input. It's all useful stuff.
_____________________________________________________________________________MCITP: Business Intelligence Developer (2005)
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