Could you please let me know
1) if there is any option to archive reports in Cognos 8 in order to maintain history data. I have a requirement where in I need to maintain the data in the report which was abt 2-3 weeks back, or even 5 years back. For example, i run a report today I have data in report which would be most current as on June 5, 2007. Here I would like to give an option to the user to view the report data / run the report for the year 2002 (June 5, 2002).
Thanks in advance..
Not really. There is a setting to keep reports for a set number of occurrences or for a specified number of days, but you can't really query them. In fact you would have to navigate to them through the Output Version functionality of Cognos Connection.
I think you may be better served to consider a mart which maintains that history for you, then model it in C8.
MDXpressor is correct you would be better off with having the history in your dwh. If you for some reason cannot do that, and you only want this functionality for a limited amount of reports you could consider automating saving the reports to a files share every day. Then you would have historical versions of the reports it wouldn't be ideal but at least the reports would exists.
Check out http://support.cognos.com/supported/docs/en/html/cognos8_bi/8.1.2mr2/ug_cra_id1896SaveReportOutputstoaFileSystem.html requires support account