COGNOS 8 and SAP BW intergation

[db1904]

Am in the midst of a project and really need help

Shall attempt to give a background to my problem:  SAP ECC 6.0 is our transaction system and all data gets reported either natively or through SAP BW (3.5). We have a few custom built systems as well whose data we attempt to get into the SAP BW system and report from there.  We bought COGNOS BI and in the process of implementing a few reports some of them which have a complex logic to help aging analysis.


The approach we have taken is write the report logic in COGNOS BI and access the BW cubes for data via SAP BEX queries. We see performance issues here wherein reports take more than 10 minutes.

I would like to have your valued judgement on the following:

1) Do you feel COGNOS BI should be used only as a presentation layer and should not be made heavy in terms of writing a lot if logic ?
2) Is there a specific way one needs to design a SAP BW cubes when COGNOS BI is used ?
3) Does COGNOS BI work better with Data Marts or Enterprise Data Warehouses (EDW) like Teradata, Greenplum ?
4) Have you seen customers who have used SAP BW as a EDW and have used COGNOS to report ?
5) COGNOS BI has its own Powerplay cubes. How scalable are they and under what circumstances should they be used ?

Thanks you for the time spent to give me your insights !!

rgds
DB

[Tzap]

Hi,

I now exactly your feelings :)

I have participated a project where reporting was based on SAP BW 7.x and Cognos 8 BI and also faced some serious performance issues (as well as modelling and reporting problems...). And that's even when we had decided to write all the business logic in SAP BW and used Cognos only as presentation layer (that was also the best decicion made during the project by far).

There where few ground rules for BW queries specially for reports which were actually developed on Cognos cubes, check IBM SAP BW cookbook for these. Also SAP BW's OLAP engine seems to work better so utilize it as much as possible through BW variables and Cognos prompts.

Actually I would really consider what is the "extra" value of using SAP BW in the middle? Or
could SAP BW's open hub destinations be utilized and pushing data in to the some "generic database" .. ?

BR,
Tzap