New to Cognos - Trying to Quickly Learn

[dmatta22201]

Good evening! I am very new to Cognos and have a tight deadline to develop a reporting capability. I am finding it difficult to locate good training to help with query development. To that end, I was hoping that someone might be able to point me to a good learning resource. I am using Cognos 10.2

I also am hung up on an immediate query need if anyone has any thoughts. I am working in Framework Manager and have four tables. CANPROJ contains CANPROJ_ID (Primary Key) and an alternate unique key of CAN_ID and FY). There are three subtables, CAN_HR_PROJ, CAN_TRAVEL_PROJ, and CAN_OTHER_PROJ. Each contains an ID field (Primary Key), a CANPROJ_ID foreign key, and an amount field. I need to develop a report that has CAN_ID and FY as two dimensions and returns the total (amount) for each CANPROJ_ID from the sub-tables. I tried adding a calculation field to the CANPROJ table for each of the subtables with the calculations "TOTAL ( CAN_HR_PROJ.amount for CANPROJ.CANPROJ_ID)", "TOTAL ( CAN_TRAVEL_PROJ.amount for CANPROJ.CANPROJ_ID)", and "TOTAL ( CAN_OTHER_PROJ.amount for CANPROJ.CANPROJ_ID)". These add the values correctly, but they seem to do complete using an outer join and I get tons of duplicate rows. I am not sure why or how to keep the duplicates out.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Dave

[Lynn]

There are some fundamental points you really need to understand before attempting development with Framework Manager. I'd suggest you go through the user guide and pay particular attention to understanding cardinality and how to establish relationships for facts and dimensions.

[Michael75]

Following up on what Lynn wrote, and in case you find the IBM site less than intuitive (join the club  :'( ), the documentation for Cognos 10.2 can be found here:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27024067

Whilst all of the Framework Manager User Guide is potentially useful, and at some time you should try to find time to work through it, I understand that currently you don't have that time. So I'd suggest reading Ch. 9 which explains the theories behind good metadata modeling, then Ch. 5 which gives you the nuts and bolts of putting this theory into practice.

Good luck
Michael