Cognos 8.4 FCS ... any thoughts?

[kyle556]

Has anyone tried out the new 8.4 FCS yet? I downloaded it and am about to put it in a test system, but it sounds more like a release candidate than full fledged production version. I think I'll wait to put it in production.

I was at forum and I heard them say "8.4 in the summer", but this wasn't what I was expecting. Has anyone heard any release dates for the "real" 8.4 version?

[josepherwin]

Have no idea about the actual 8.4 official release date, but we are planning to upgrade to 8.4 FCS nevertheless.

Some of the reasons are:
1. It's pretty much the same as 8.3

2. NO MORE CUBESWAP in 8.4 Transformer!! which is wicked ;D In Transformer 8.4 under cube properties you can now Copy and Activate to multiple locations (different servers) the cube in 1 go without affecting the user at all (e.g. you wont have to disable the data sources, Cognos doesnt lock the actual .mdc file anymore). This also translate to 1 single command line to do the whole lot from cube building to copying and activating the cube (see example below). The only downside is that it keeps versions of the cubes and require manual clean up.


3. RS now support multiple hierarchies from the same dimension in a report when you are building reports of cubes. Hence, it is now possible to author reports that reference more than one hierarchy within a single dimension. This wasnt possible in 8.3.
Example: I wanted to build a crosstab report of cube in RS and wanted to have my columns on different hierarchies of the date dimension (Year hierarchies and month hierarchies). If you do it in 8.3, it will throw and error, but it doesnt in 8.4.


So say bye bye to all your cubeswap scripting :)

example of the new commandline:

cogtr -n -nologo -c -g -k"signon" -m"cubemodel path"
-n      = running in Windows batch mode
-nologo = when cogtr is called, it doesn’t open with the splash screen
-g      = Copy and activate the cube after it's finished building
-k      = Signons (you can have multiple signons as well)
-m      = Model location
-c      = create/build the cube

[kyle556]

Yeah, the improvements to cube management is definitely interesting. I'm also eager to try out the new suppress zero functionality, since so many of our users have been screaming for simpler zero suppression.