Cognos 10.2.1 FP1 - Experiences

[whogotdafunk]

Has anyone else tried putting in FP1 for 10.2.1? I'm curious how thing went for you. Here's our experience (thus far).

We tried putting in FP1 last week only to run into a number of issue. The first was that an existing report "broke" so badly that it killed the BIBus process it was running on (core dump and all), which in turn killed any other report(s) that were using the same BIBus process - we were getting mixed DPR-ERR-2056 and DPR-ERR-2077 errors. Troubleshooting was difficult when we didn't know what we were looking for due to one report crashing causing others to crash as well.

Once we got through that we saw widespread failures of report views with error RSV-SRV-0040, which is a pretty non-descript error. We spent a few days digging deep on that one and it would appear that many report views with set prompts fail in FP1, if the prompt page was never opened in FP1. In other words if you create a new report view and don't set prompts it will fail, however if you create or update the prompts on a report view (after FP1 install), then that report view starts working. According to IBM support this is a known issue and they're actively working to resolve.

If you've run into other issues please let me know. This is by far the "flakiest" fix pack I've seen out of Cognos, but I've only been around since 8.4 - rumor has it there were some bad releases prior to that. Thanks for any feedback you might have, Daniel

[bdbits]

We've not put in the fix pack yet, as we upgraded to 10.2.1 just before it came out. *sigh*

It sounds like your particular problem may be different and you probably already did this, but I thought it better to mention it just in case. There was a report spec change with the fix pack, as noted on the fix pack page toward the bottom of the first section. Basically, post-install you have to update all reports per the instructions in the tech note they reference. If you have not done so already, you can run a content manager job to sweep through them all (rather than opening them one at a time).

Fix pack notes: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24035542
Tech note on CM job: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24035542

As far as flakiness, 10.2.X in general has not been as stable for us as the last few releases. We seem to have some nagging problems with BI bus processes getting zombied, oddball server-side behavior for certain queries, and some report techniques used in the past are not working very well (or at all) from a performance standpoint. But we are not going to roll back as that would be far more of a headache, so we are dealing with it through IBM tech support and copious amounts of legal stimulants (coffee, sodas, etc.).  8)

[whogotdafunk]

Thanks for the response bdbits - too bad you're saying 10.2.x is flakey... That's not exactly what I was hoping to hear, but it is "comforting" to know we're not on our own...

As for content upgrade - FP1 doesn't even give you a choice. The moment you start up the content manager after the FP install it actually automatically does a content upgrade. No questions, no options, nothing - actually rather annoying. And just in case, we ran a separate content upgrade after we started encountering issues - no luck.

We have since opened up another case with IBM - there are now at least 2 major issues that we're aware of, that have caused roughly 40% of our report views we use for testing to fail. The large part is due to an issue with Report Views post FP1 install, the other area affected are reports with multiple levels of unions and joins (our diagnosis thus far). We're still waiting for fixes on both.

Send me a message if you want more details on the issues.

[bdbits]

Yikes, I have not had as many problems pre-FP1 as you have post-FP1, and I think I am glad we have not put FP1 up on any of the servers just yet. The problems I mentioned are persistent and annoying and we are trying to get them resolved, but the expanded browser support and some nice improvements here and there have been welcome. I'm not sure why we didn't run across the issues in testing, just did not pick reports with the right combinations to go wrong I guess. And of course prod has a lot more users on it.

We have one data warehouse where the reports use a lot of multi-level unions/joins, so hopefully by the time we do our next update, you will have worked out all those issues for us. Good luck! ;D

[mvferrari]

In testing out our upgrade from 10.2.0 to 10.2.1, we have found issues with our environment and the fixpack, causing me to uninstall everything on the app server and gateway server and start over.  After installing and configuring 10.2.1, we found no major issues.  All the applications worked as expected, report studio report upgrades were seamless and saved without a problem.  Then when the fixpack is installed, Cognos Workspace won't load, although Cognos Workspace Advanced does.  Also, Report Studio is basically broken...Reports will run, but when revalidating them they won't save.  Nor can you create a new report and get it to save.  We have an SR open with Cognos now to determine the cause, but no real ideas so far.  This same behavior has occurred with two different clean installs, so I'm scratching my head trying to figure out where to go next.  We need the fixpack to resolve some issues that we had hotfixes for in our 10.2.0 install.

[MFGF]

Hmmm. I have 10.2.1 FP1 installed, and I'm not seeing any of the same issues with Report Studio. Strange!!

MF.

[sir_jeroen]

And to add another annoying issue:
See my topic:Testers needed for Data Retention issue in 10.2.1 FP1  http://www.cognoise.com/index.php/topic,22870.0.html

[cognostechie]

One of my clients faced a no. of issues with 10.2.1. The reports prompt to select a connection and it wasn't like that in 10.2. Add to the fact that they don't like the screen and the icons. Considering the no. of problems faced by other people, I advised them to upgrade from 10.2.1 to 10.1.1 (yes, yes, yes, that's an upgrade because it resolves the issues..so the issues were detected in 10.2.1 and fixed in the newer version 10.1.1  ;D)

[Kiran P]

After applying FP1, we are facing issues with Multitenancy which was configured and working earlier and we are also not able to run any report on mobile/ipad. Is anyone facing issues with these features?

[guthikv]

Hi,

Can any one tell me what all the Internet browsers that are supported for this install. We installed 10.2.1 and FP1 is applied. Is there a link to the supported environments?

Thanks,
KK.

[bdbits]

Supported software environments: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27037784

[murali999]

Hi whogotdafunk,

we had the same issues with FP01 and got the IF for the issues
the IF :  IBM Cognos BI 10.2.1.1 IF1040 (10.2.5001.1040)

PMR :PM98814
and PMR: PM98999

the above IF will solve the problem with uniouns etc..
("We tried putting in FP1 last week only to run into a number of issue. The first was that an existing report "broke" so badly that it killed the BIBus process it was running on (core dump and all), which in turn killed any other report(s) that were using the same BIBus process - we were getting mixed DPR-ERR-2056 and DPR-ERR-2077 errors. Troubleshooting was difficult when we didn't know what we were looking for due to one report crashing causing others to crash as well.")

Let me know if you need the any other details about this

Regards,
Murali.

[sidfever]

We are planning to move from Cognos 8.4.1 to Cognos 10. And we are confused whether we should move to Cognos 10.2 FP1 or Cognos 10.2.1 FP1.

Could you give some ideas?

[Francois51]

If it can help others, I've had the problems with the workspace studio. It wouldn't load when upgraded from 10.2 to 10.2.1 FP1.

Reinstalling FP1 and clearing Internet Explorer cache di the trick. Possibly a reboot of both gateway and application server could help.

[whogotdafunk]

Thought I should let everyone know that we've gone live with Cognos 10.2.1. FP1 now. It required 4 hot fixes and a couple of SEV 1s with IBM which resulted in "tweaks" to the configuration (deactivating certain services on various servers). None of this was super-clear in the documentation and errors were so intermittent it took hundreds or thousands of report runs to replicate the issue - very painful to troubleshoot.

In the end the configuration changes required were:
1. Disable the "job service" on the CM (this was causing intermittent DPR-ERR-2072 errors - like once in every 500-1000 reports).
2. Disable mobile service on all but one app-tier server - there were load-balancing issues with it running on more than one app tier server.

Hopefully this can help someone if they're having similar issues. Thanks, Daniel

[MFGF]

Thanks for the update! :)

MF.