creatinga cognos reporting package /reporting model

[nfldbunker]

hi

we are fairly new to cognos and BI. just wondering if anyone has any tips,documents best practises for staring a BI framewkr package for a reporting model for a sql database with about 150 tables both transactional and lookup.should we model and out the reporting data out there for consumers to use or should we build a collectiosn of reports and or analysis objects,charts,etc  or should we look at building some cognos cubes so users could analyse data and get familar with the cognos portal environment.

regards

bunker

[blom0344]

The answer will be: it all depends..   ;)

There are best practices for modelling the framework from a technical perspective (though more than one best practice are there  ;)  ), but in your case you should take the customer as a starting point.
Do they expect canned reports with conditional styling , logos, cascading prompts etc. Then develop in Report Studio. Do they want to create simple lists etc with no special requirements then build idiot-proot starschema's for them to play with in query studio.
Do they want to spend time analysing, slicing and dicing , then build cubes or a DMR model for analysts.

Each Cognos tool is more or less complementary to the others. The big benefit of the last 8 versions is that the technology (and portal) is more homogeneous, especially if you can implement DMR instead of traditional C7 cubes..