One of the new/improved features of Cognos Analytics 12.0.4 is the AI Assistant.  And I know that my management team is chomping at the bit to use any new AI feature that becomes available.

So I thought I'd try using these features.  Blocked!  "This data source has not been enriched."

Looking at the manual option for enriching a package, it looks like all I can do is tell Cognos which columns are date/time or location.

What I was hoping for is that my users can ask natural language questions of packages containing thousands of columns of non-trivial data.  So a user might ask a simple question like, "Show me expenditures by month for the last biennium for job number XE343401."

So, Cognos would need to know:

• A job number is WorkOrderGroupNumber or WorkOrderNum + GroupNumber.
• Expenditures could be called Expeses, Expended, Actual, etc.
• "last" biennium is 2023-2025.  The 2023-2025 biennium is the same as the biennium with begin year 2023 or the sum of FY2024 and FY2025.  Also relevant, for system load and query performance reasons, is that since the user is asking for only one biennium of financial data, using the biennium begin year column on the fact table will help because that is how the database is partitioned.  You get a query performance improvement of 2x to 40x if you craft the SQL properly.
• There are 24, 25, or 26 "months" in a biennium, depending on whether the employee works primarily with budget, program management, or accounting subjects.

...and when the user is asking for months from financial data, they are not asking for something that is really date/time data.  They are fiscal periods, not really months.  But they still need to be presented in the correct order, and there may be a need to forecast even though it is not considered time-based data (since only accountants - and not the Cognos devs - think there are 13 months in a year).

I do have available to me a data catalog that maps business terms to data objects.  So that could help.

How do I feed synonyms and other relevant vocabulary and business relationships to the AI?

Seems like that on the surface -- attending training asking trivial questions against trivial data.  But when the business user needs to answer a real-world question using actual data...  How many end users do you think will become experts in DAX and M?

A workaround that usually works for me is clearing the csk folder in FM and copying over csk from Content manager.

Is there a programmatic way to hardcode a datasource connection do be used by a report?
We have a dilemma right now where we have hundreds of report schedules.
We need to introduce a new datasource connection and in doing so will make all scheduled report connection ambiguous.

Planning to create the new datasource connection and just assign execute and traverse. I just need to find a way to make sure i can use this new datasource connection on specific reports.

Creating a new Datasource is not a viable option right now.


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Cognos does have better features and is more versatile but it also requires technical resources which were hard to find. Most developers are average and nobody was able to make self-service BI which resulted in inferior results. Power BI is easier to use even if it provides less results overall and average resources are sufficient for it.

An unfortunate outcome of Microsoft evangelism and indoctrination in offices and college and high school classrooms.  Power BI continues to have more and more followers even though it is inferior to products like Cognos Analytics.

I've seen this myself.  I have had complaints that people want Power BI instead of Cognos because Cognos changes too often.  A little confusing for me based on facts:  I upgrade Cognos every 2 years.  The last upgrade and the next have little that users notice.  So no noticeable change for most users for at least 4 years.  Meanwhile, Power BI changes every month.  I've seen step-by-step instructions written 3 weeks ago that can no longer be followed.  I've also seen that reports created this month can't be opened in last month's Power BI Desktop.  So it's clear that people make that decision based on religious preference, not based on actual product capabilities.

As far as I know, Cognos is now almost dead, killed by Power BI, in spite of licensing cost going down so user groups won't really matter anymore. The only companies who now use Cognos are the ones who have applications sold to them by vendors who have BI made in Cognos and who have not migrated yet (Ex: Deltek who sells their ERP along with a BI made using Cognos without a Data Warehouse - the worst BI I have ever seen)

Hello everyone,

I'm new to IBM Cognos Controller, and this is my very first installation on our server. I've followed the official IBM documentation for setup, but I've run into two issues that I can't resolve.

Problem 1 – Controller Client
When I launch the classic Controller client, I receive the following error:


The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized.
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(SoapClientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall)
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters)
   at Cognos.Controller.ControllerSoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodname, Object[] parameters)
   at Cognos.Controller.Proxy.Light.WSLight.CheckServerConnection(String sGuid, String sUser)
   at Cognos.Controller.Direct.ServerInfoD.CheckServerConnection()
   at CCR.AppContext.CheckConnectionToServer()


Problem 2 – Controller Web
When I access Controller Web in the browser at http://localhost:9085, I get a login popup. After entering the credentials, it refreshes and shows the same login screen again in a continuous loop.

Popup message:
The server is initializing, or the session has expired.
Please refresh the page in the web browser or log in.


Additional context:

The environment already has Cognos Analytics and Planning Analytics running successfully.

Has anyone experienced these issues during a fresh installation? Any guidance or troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Wondering what are the things one has to learn if someone wants to be an AI professional. Some research shows that Python knowledge is expected. Apart from this, can anybody suggest what are the other things to learn?   

Quote from: hamlet on 06 Aug 2025 02:17:14 PMI have a simple report (in report studio), version 11.2.4. A few columns have quantity or dollar amounts (all numbers).  The user requirement is that they want to export the report in excel data format and the number columns need to be in the excel format 'Number' (not excel format 'general').  So far easy enough, but then there is a second requirement: they also want to have the number values to have no commas for the thousands separator.  I can't figure out how to satisfy both of these requirements.  In Cognos I set format to 'Number' and set thousands separator = 'No'.  But that does not transfer over to excel, it comes in as excel format 'Number' WITH the thousands separator. 

I tried to convert the number to a character string, this satisfies requirement #2 (removes comma) but does not satisfy requirement #1 (excel format = number).

Any ideas on this?

There are some limitations on what formatting options in a Cognos report Excel supports, including the decimal and group separators in numbers. In short, I don't think you can do this easily. One option might be to fire a macro after the Excel output has been generated, but this wouldn't take into account people rendering the reports interactively.

Details of the formatting restrictions are below:

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cognos-analytics/11.2.x?topic=format-unsupported-cognos-analytics-watson-formatting

Cheers!

MF.