Reporting: ad hoc vs. canned

[ry1633]

Hello,

I was wondering if someone can help me understand the difference between ad hoc vs. canned reports in Cognos.  What do they mean by those?   And why is Report Studio for canned reports, and Query Studio/Workspace Advanced supposed to be for ad hoc reporting?

I'm going to be doing reports development for my unit, and between my team and my users, I think there is some confusion as to which is which, and the purposes for each.   So I thought I'd reach out to the group for some clarification.  many thanks for your help.  -ry

[Robl]

Canned reports normally means reports that are complete and ready to run.
Or possibly run overnight.
They are dashboards, standard reports. PDFs and exports.
They are reports that run daily, weekly, monthly and don't change.
'Canned' isn't a Cognos term afaik, but it is often used in the BI world.

Ad-Hoc reports are normally created when someone has a specific request.
They are normally created, run once and then discarded.

Report Studio allows you to create good looking reports, it has a lot of formatting options.
Query Studio/Workspace advance allows you access to the same package and data, but it has fewer formatting options.

Personally - I prefer to use Report Studio for both ad-hoc and canned reports because it's a tool I'm used to.
Workspace advanced is just a cut down version of report studio - and if you're going to trust users to create reports in workspace advanced you may as well train them to use report studio.

If you have a team of dedicated report developers just use Report Studio for everything.

[bdbits]

"Canned" is commonly used in any reporting context to mean a report or query that has been saved as an object that anyone can run (with permissions of course).

"ad hoc" generally means the user is creating a report or query interactively, and may or may not save it for later use, but at least when created is something a particular user wanted to view at the time.

I do not agree that Report Studio is always preferable over Workspace Advanced for the general populace, particularly in a self-service style deployment. It is not a matter of trust, but usability. For non-technical authors, the RS interface can be a bit overwhelming. WA is also far more interactive, which can be very engaging thus encouraging self-service, and requires very little training if you have put in the effort to make a business-centric package with good metadata. Even as an IT person, WA is nice and easy for quick little ad hoc queries. And since it shares the same schema as Report Studio, you can always open your WA-generated report in RS for tweaking should you decide you need more. (And vice-versa for that matter.)

So there is no hard-and-fast rule on which one to use. Use the one you prefer, since you can share the object in both, or RS if you need its more advanced features.

[Lynn]

I would add that Query Studio is an older tool that will be deprecated at some point. If it isn't in use currently within your environment then I'd suggest you avoid it entirely and start up with Workspace Advanced instead.

[ry1633]

Yeah I have heard that about QS.  I haven't taken any training with that piece, and only did one practice piece with it.  So I won't spend too much time on it.  Have started to look at Workspace Advanced and I think I like it better than Query Studio anyway.  :)

Many thanks for all your help in this thread - I'm starting to have some meetings with the users who will be doing reporting in my unit.  All this helps me clarify things a bit better.