Other Alternatives to build Cognos Cubes

[luis osorio]

Are there other Alternatives to build Cognos Cubes or we must live with PowerPlay Transformer?

I am new at OLAP using cognos 8, however I found that is really hard to maintain cubes using powerplay, a slight change on them can cause to be only recognizible by powerplay but not for cognos connection, which starts to complaint about there are missing dimensions.

I opted to create tables with sumarized information then I added regular dimensions and measures to them in a framework manager model, but few days ago I heard that this is not a good practice as performance issues can arise.

so, are there other ways to produce cubes in cognos 8?