Cognos Express and ETL from ERPs?

[mr j]

Hi all,

a very newbish question,

Say a company is looking for more cost effective solution in terms of license costs than existing Cognos BI and they are interested in Cognos Express. There's possibly several ERP-systems which data is required, but of course it first needs to be cleaned up from obsolete data, consolidated etc.
What kind of options are there with Express? Experiences? Please don't say TM1 Turbo Integrator. If you do, I admit I need to update myself on the subject  ;)

[MFGF]

Express comes with a couple of "ETL" tools - one is TI (shudder) and the other is Data Advisor. They are OK for building ICAS cubes (TM1) but certainly not geared up for "proper" ETL.

You'd perhaps need to look at an ETL tool outside of Express that will load your data into a reporting database - maybe SSIS or Data Manager, or (if you have bigger data volumes and some tricky data cleansing issues) something like DataStage and QualityStage. Costs start getting eye-wateringly high when you look at the kinds of tools like the last two in the list, though.

If you are going to use TI, you will need to get some familiarity with it, and understand how to hand-crank SQL queries. There are few cleansing options, and I think the better you are with coding the source queries, the more successful you will be with it.

Good luck!!

MF.

[cognostechie]

You can also write your own SQL as Stored Procedures to do the ETL job without buying an ETL tool. That's what I did for a company and it turned out really well. Once the DW is created, then you can use Framework Manager for relational BI and TM1 for dimensional BI.

[mr j]

Thank you for sharing your views, pretty much what I expected... unfortunately   ;)

Is it too bold to say that Data Advisor is lightweight Framework Manager for business users?

[MFGF]

Data Advisor allows very basic ICAS cube creation, but as a consequence of it being an end-user tool it is severely limited in what it will do.

MF.

[cognostechie]

I worked for a company that had Cognos Express but they had Framework Manager too. Not sure if FM was included in Express or they brought it separately. 

[mr j]

Yes, FM is included in Express 10, just installing the whole bunch to see what there is to see   :)