Genral Question : Cognos Development

[oracle]

I am new to Cognos and would like to know how the development process in Cognos flows in organizations. For example to start up with my very basic question is, Is Cognos reporting done on production database by selecting production database environment in Cognos FM or we have to connect to development database environment in Cognos framework manager ?

[bus_pass_man]

You definitely want to have a development environment which is separate from your production environment.  You would do your modeling using the development environment.

The envisioned workflow is to put changes into a deployment and transfer it via the deployment to the production environment although you can publish directly from FM to your production environment.  The draw back for that is that it makes co-ordinating package changes with report versions difficult.  You might want to do that entirely in your dev environment first.

[oracle]

So, the datawarehouse/database we connect is only the production environment database? And then so we start building models using the tables from the production database? I'm new to Cognos FM modeling and I'm trying to understand that as Cognos is for reporting purpose, the database that we use for modeling has to be the final production database only or the development process is followed?
i.e. Cognos FM dev connected to dev database, Cognos FM QA connected to QA database and Cognos FM UAT connected to UAT database ?

(I am sorry the question is very naïve but this is my first step towards understanding certain workflows. Thanks)

[cognostechie]

It's hard to understand what you are trying to ask as your questions contradict each other.

There should be DEV environment, UAT environment and PROD environment. Cognos FM is installed only on DEV environment and the packages will be published on DEV only. Once the development is complete then the package will be moved to UAT and after the UAT is complete and you get an OK from the users then the package from  UAT will be deployed to Production.

[bdbits]

The environment comments are correct. I thought maybe you are also trying to get a handle on the databases themselves and how they relate to the packages.

You can use different databases for each environment, and that would in fact be a best practice and what is normally done. Just understand that packages come from Framework Manager (FM) models, which are based on underlying databases and their schema. So the database schema needs to match what FM 'saw' when the model was created and the package published, in order for reports based on the package to actually work when they run.

So the lifecycle starting from scratch might look something like this.

* Create the development (DEV) database, or copy production (PROD) to DEV as a starting point.
* Create a data source connection to your DEV database.
* Create an FM model and publish the package(s) to the DEV Cognos environment.
* Create/copy the database to Test/UAT (TEST).
* On TEST Cognos, create a connection to the TEST database.
* Use content deployment to copy the DEV Cognos package to TEST Cognos.
* Upon approval, create the PROD database and Cognos connection, then copy the package to PROD Cognos. Remember, the database must match what was used to create the package.

Now assume there are database changes to be made...

* Make the database changes on the DEV database.
* Modify the DEV FM package(s) to reflect the changes.
* At the same time, make the database changes on TEST and copy your updated package to TEST Cognos.
* Upon approval, make the database changes on PROD and copy the updated Cognos package(s) to PROD.

So the main thing is to keep separate environments as would be common to most IT projects, but you must remember to keep things in sync as they move from DEV to TEST to PROD.

I hope this helps.

[oracle]

Thanks this helped! Finally, I have setup three database environments in Cognos Framework Manager for my project. The Cognos FM Dev will be using development database, Cognos FM UAT to UAT database and Cognos FM PROD to PROD database.