What is the best way to make Cognos Connection seem offline

[andy_mason_84]

All,

I need to run a full rebuild of my datamart mid week, this is usually done over the weekend when no users are running reports etc.

I want to run the build without any users being able to query the DB.  Now the obvious answer is the stop the services so that when they log onto cognos connection they get the error but is there a slicker way to let users know it is just down temporarily and will be back up soon?

Answers on a postcard :)

Cheers,

[simon.hodgkiss]

hi Andy,

Probably not the best solution, but if you're using IIS you could create a temporary webpage in your website's Home Directory filesystem location informing users "the environment is offline for planned maintenance until x o'clock", and temporarily make it the top default document page in Properties>Documents of the website whilst your datamart rebuild occurs.  Once the rebuild has finished, remove the page from Documents list, or move it down the order.  If the data mart is the only data source queried by reporting in your environment then this might suffice?

If there are other data sources which aren't affected by the datamart rebuild, then you might still want to leave your environment up and running for these, in which case you could edit the data source connection signon to remove users\groups\roles who can use it.  They'd still get a relatively ugly Cognos error message like "You do not have permission to use the signon <yoursignonname>" or "Cannot connect to the Database <yourdatabasename>" when attempting to run their reports though.

Simon


ps.  Grim and Joe123 posted some responses on custom login pages in this thread which may also be helpful to you:

http://www.cognoise.com/community/index.php/topic,18806.0.html

[wyconian]

Hi

Could you schedule the rebuild to happen out of hours so there is no impact on your users?

[vasudev_chavan]

I have an idea how to implement it using SDK.

Specific data source can be disable using SDK and can be re-enabled using the same.

Thanks,
Vasudev