This article was originally posted by Rick Ensign from The Ironside Group and we thought it to be an excellent article, especially for those of us who come from an EP backgroup originally!

Managing SKIPCHECK and Feeders in IBM Cognos TM1

When you first begin to use TM1, especially if you came from the EP world as I did, you can quickly become enamored with how well TM1 can handle large cubes with ease. You can create multiple hierarchies within a cube and within those hierarchies TM1’s sparse consolidation algorithm aggregates values at light speed. You can reach out to virtually any data source with a Turbo Integrator (TI) process and create a dimension, create and populate a cube with data, or a myriad of other tasks only limited by the developer’s imagination. The challenge comes when you need to write rules governing more complex calculations or movement of data between cubes. No intuitive D-Links or BiF’s here. Everything must be coded, and getting the calculations to work properly requires mastering the art of feeders.

IBM publish their own books for use with their products.  The IBM Cognos 10 Redbook is available here.

I received an interesting email the other day from a colleague regarding an alternative way of financing software, hardware, support and InfoCube services from IBM.  Using IBM Global Finance (which apparently is in the top ten largest financial institutions globally), you can lease the entire package so that it includes not only the hardware and software, but also our services to implement the solution.  Neat, huh!

TM1 9.5.2 includes major changes that will support very large numbers of parralel users and massive improvements to performance when used as a source for Cognos 10.

Despite the small increment in the version number, (from 9.5.1 -> 9.5.2), our understanding is this is a major release with significant changes to the database locking mechanism, multi-user access and parallel processing.

This check-list was recently used at a client to upgrade them from Cognos 8.3 BI and Cognos Planning 8.3 to 8.4.1.