Do you allow users to run Report Studio in PROD?

[mjcotter]

Hi, I'm curious what people are doing for Report Studio in their Production environments?  Management here is very fearful of allowing the end users the ability to use and run Report Studio in Production.  The fear is that users can potentially create and run queries that could take down the database.  Note:  We are allowing them to use Query Studio in Production. 

Do you allow your end users to use Report Studio in Production?

We are currently running Cognos BI 8.2 with plans to migrate to 8.4 during the 1st quarter of next year.

Thanks!
Matt

[Suraj]

No.
The only person who can use report studio in our environment is a power user.
There is one power user per branch and is well trained in Report Studio.
Other users don't have access to report studio at all in production.

[billylodz]

I have the same.

some users will have access to RS but just to cubes.

[adm_agec]

I don't think there are many problem with query.. that could even take down the db!
At run will appear a WARNING! ;)

Am I wrong guys? ???

[billylodz]

You can be wrong, all depends of model but it's possible to kill db.

[adm_agec]

Ok ok ;)

[jpolak]

We do not allow the use of Report Studio in Production.
(Query Studio - yes... Report Studio - no)

[JGirl]

There's no hard & fast rules for what the policy should be.  I'd say it depends on many things, including:
* what your IT policy is, particular with regards to DB access, change control etc
* the quality, performance and availability of your dev/test/prod environment(s) (both cognos and databases)
* how savvy your users are
* how responsive your support team is
* much time the administrator can spare for deployments etc

Example 1:
I once worked for a company who had strict IT policies, and all brand new development & model changes (such as project work) were done in dev then deployed through to test & prod after various rounds of testing.  New reports from existing models were developed in test (the test DB was always within a week of being up to date), and regular deployments of a particular folder from test to prod were done twice a week at allocated times, and no one had RS access in production.  Of course, it does need to be accepted by the support team that there will be scenarios where the agreed deployment schedules wont be suitable (such as a brand new report for that end of month meeting that needs to be run in prod in the next 2 hours!), so there needs to be procedures to cope with these requests (either an ad-hoc deployment, or your administrators may need to run a report).

Example 2:
I also once worked for a company that had a single environment only, so reports were being written in production.  If you want to use this model i'd recommend locking down most of the public folders so that there are only a few 'writeable' common areas for the power users, and this way most people will tend to store their 'junk' queries in their 'My folders' rather than clogging up the public folders with half finished or ad-hoc style queries.

Also:
If you decide to go with the option for giving users access in prod, it is possible to place governers on your models to prevent users running queries that would 'kill' the DB too - such as limiting the query run time or the number of records.  Its also possible for the cognos administrators to monitor user activity using the audit package (so long as it is configured) to keep an eye on performance, query execution success etc.  This could then be used to identify common mistakes or suitable candiates for additional training (or license cancellation!!). 

Hope this helps
J