Cognos 8 Introduction - business-intelligence

Being a programmer who likes all things terminal (like Vim and the GNU tools), I've finally met my match. The company I work for has decided to move from an in-house developed report generator to the Cognos suite.
We have had some informal meetings/workshops regarding the process of creating reports in Cognos, but I can't really make it stick on my non-GUI brain.
Does anyone know of any nice introductions or tutorial style documents explaining how to create projects in the Framework Manager and reports in Report Studio?

Better practice your mouse-moving muscles. :)
I came across this presentation, it is for Reportnet which is a pre-cursor to Cognos 8 but it is high-level enough to give you an accurate overview of how stuff works in Cognos.
There's a lot of content on IBM Developerworks
I really think you will like the old Cognos Multimedia Knowledge Base. They have stopped developing content for it (last C8 content is for version 8.1) but for an intro it will serve you well. Look at the Reportnet Stuff too, it is older but you will get a feel for "how stuff works" in Cognos.

Related

QlikView Resources

I want to add Qlikview Development to my skill-set. I have a C# and SQl background. Are there any free online resources to getting me going at developer level not end-user? What's the best starting place for me and the level of difficulty involved.
I am looking for resources that can help me to expert level. One resource I found is the Udemy course and if anyone has done it please share your review of the course content.
You can find good videos on youtube (like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef_BigFXCis).
When you install qlikview, you have there a qlikview tutorial directory. Follow the pdf file and do everything on that pdf. it is very extensive, but after that you can start developing intermediate solutions. The PDF actually covers the whole QV official course.
After that, go to the qlikview cookbook site and start exploring more possibilities.
Find more blogs on QV and subscribe to them.
QV community is amazing. use it!
Qlikview is relatively easy to "get" at first, but don't be fooled by its simplicity - its a whole platform. I've been developing in QV 7 years now and still learn something new once in a while.
And I have to say it - its a very good choice! QV is amazing and very popular.
There isn't much I couldn't do with it.

BI Tool(information builders vs oracle BI

we are kind of in a ‘decision making situation’ to make a road map of our BI system.
I would like to hear experts opinion on Information Builders when compared to Oracle BI. I am working in Oracle BI but I dont have knowledge on Webfocus offered by Information Builders, so problably users who has knowledge on both sides, has a good overview on pros and cons.
Like to hear any opinion or suggestion.
Thanks in advance.
I currently work with IBI products and their reporting language WebFocus 8. This along with their new AppStudio development tool and BI Portal deployment platform. If you like being forced to use a GUI to build your user-facing components, having no good access to the HTML, then go with IBI and WF. Other than their having forced the developer to lose access to edit HTML, and tool generated code being horrid, it's a fairly good product. Their new push for responsive design is still early in its implementation. Lots of restrictions and good portions of their products rely on being both compatible with IE8 or used in IE. Not much of a fan of IBI.

Is there a simple Bugzilla/Trac client for use by non software folks?

I'm aware this isn't exactly a programming question, but it directly impacts our developers and the code we're assigned to write. If there's another SO-like forum where this could be better posted, please let me know and I'll take the question down from here & post it there.
Our work environment is a couple of developers creating (20-30%) and maintaining (lion's share) legacy software for factory production floor and test workers to use to calibrate or test the equipment the company sells. We've implemented a very simple Google form based bug reporting page, but we're already running into problems of scale (approx 40:1 them:us and lots of old-old buggy software that we didn't write). The company has tried using Bugzilla before my arrival with little success, the factory folks were apparently intimidated by it and wouldn't use it. However, they seem to like the simple Google form and the wizard-like steps to file a bug or request a feature. We're currently manually cutting & pasting their bug/feature requests from the Google form spreadsheet into Trac, and manually tracking the bugs/feature requests on a white board with magnetic bug cards. We're only a few weeks into this system and it's already showing it fragility and lack of scalability.
Ideally we'd have a Windows >= XP web or desktop client that would provide:
Simplified bug reporting, a Wizard like approach seems to work well
Customizable for our software packages (like drop downs for each)
Bugzilla or Trac integration
Standard bug tracking features developers and management can use
I've found the winners of the "Make Bugzilla Pretty" contest, but coming from a pure software house where we just used straight Bugzilla out of the box, I'm unclear on how to configure and install these skins. Obviously I can figure this out but don't want to go down that path if it's not going to solve our basic problem which is non-technical people reporting bugs.
TaskCompiler, found on the Bugzilla wiki site seemed like a candidate because it talks to both Bugzilla & Trac, but their sales page is offline and the site hasn't been updated since 2012 and I'm unsure as to their viability.
I'm certain we're not the first production facility to run into problems like this, I'm looking for recommendations to help solve both our scalability as well as-ease-of-use problem.
Another thought that occurs to me is a GAS script to push our current Google forms based bug reports into Trac or Bugzilla.
Edit: The decision between Bugzilla/Trac seems to have been made for us. I'm exploring options for using Trac here if you want to follow along.

Desktop app vs. Web app development differences and similarities

Forgive me if there is vagueness in this question. In a nutshell, I've built websites for several years, working with PHP, Javascript, JSON, AJAX, HTML, CSS3 and ASP-(many years ago when I didn't know better).
Lately I'm coming across projects where the clients prefer the app on their desktop (offline) rather than on the web.
Is it going to be a long road ahead to learn this? I can't get my head wrapped around going from web to desktop. Could someone give me a 50,000 ft overview of what I need to research? No details needed.. just an overall approach.
Are there packages out there I should read into which give tools for running a system "offline" so to speak? I'm not sure of there terminology or even where to start.
One of the main reasons is that features like Imagemagick seems too slow to process images online. The client would like tool where they don't have to rely on the speed of internet. Go Daddy is useless when it comes to upgrading their tools and I hope to do a standalone system for image processing.
Also, I'd like to get into making desktop widgets like time tracking tools, or anything that can be self-contained and running from a downloaded program that I would create.
Is this a really bad idea?
Try Auto it, it has a tiny foot print and it is great for writing small tools. It does have an GUI editor.
example of auto it widget
auto it widget
Other than that you could use industrial strength Microsoft Developer studios for either VB or C# . You can even do apps in VBA excel.

Where does Oracle ADF 11g stands among Java EE Frameworks?

This is a two part question:
I would like to know where does Oracle ADF 11g stand as a framework to develop / deploy Web / Java EE Applications as compared to other frameworks.
How much is Oracle ADF being used as a framework to Develop Web Applications.
I am asking from a perspective that whether or not there are good job opportunities as an Oracle ADF Developer and what the future looks like for those holding Oracle ADF skills.
Also as Oracle plans to use ADF as core technology for Fusion Applications, Is it good time to build Oracle ADF skills as a siebel developer? As the future Oracle CRM Applications like ERP, SCM will be based on ADF should developers start building ADF skills. Around when will customers start implementing those applications based on ADF. Will these be available On Premise or mostly On Demand in SaaS way.
We have chosen Oracle ADF in our company for one of our projects. Sadly, this proved to be a big mistake. I personally have used Oracle products, in particular their DB, but as far as fusion middleware is concerned, I would advise you to stay away from it. ADF was by far the worst framework I have ever used as an architect. Some of its features I noticed are: very complex, Oracle just "invents" or forces some development approaches that have been proven as a bad practice by the Java community years ago. ADF is very slow compared to other frameworks. With being slow I mean ADF pages run slow. The reason for this is extremely complex generated html and javascript. You can check this by opening up Firebug and inspecting the generated html...it looks like something from the 90s...Terrible. Not to be overly pedantic, but ADF pages have huge amounts of validation errors causing problems in making them run on all browsers. The architecture of ADF is, in my view, messy. Struts2 for example is a much cleaner framework which makes it very easy to integrate it with 3rd party libraries such jQuery, etc. Oracle advocates ADF as an MVC framework but frankly I failed to see the actual MVC architecture there.
ADF uses its own javascript libraries, which are huge, practically impossible to modify, unoptimized and slow in comparison to others such as jQuery or Prototype. The emerging trends in J2EE are lightweight pluggable frameworks that are easily integrated with other tools such a Spring for managing dependencies, jQuery for scripting, CC for continuous integration. ADF is a heavy-weight tightly-integrated framework with other ORacle tools, which makes it very difficult to use it any other way than Oracle devised.
Not to mention the development tools that you are forced to used when developing ADF - the JDeveloper which is very buggy and crashes regularly. Developing in Eclipse is problematic, because ADF has numerous "specific" files which JDeveloper generates automatically.
All in all...ADF was a huge disappointment for us. We spent months messing with it, when finally our client decided the application was too slow and difficult for them to support it and the cancelled it altogether.
Based on my experience i can only say stay away from it. Choose one of the more supported and architecturally clean solutions such as Struts2 or Spring.
I have used JDeveloper 10 and 11, both with ADF, on two enterprise ADF projects for a prominent defense contractor. I agree that ADF is complex, but disagree that JDev crashes frequently, or that the pages are slow to render.
Now... why ADF? Read Oracle's synopsis below, stating that JDeveloper and ADF make Java EE development more accessible to "business" programmers. While this does not guarantee elegant programs, it does almost certainly guarantee that, when these developers get into trouble with ADF, they will probably be utterly lost and will have little idea how to open the hood and reach inside. Conversely, they would be lost even sooner trying to integrate the current J2EE open-source cornucopia.
THE SERMON
Source: ADF Developer's guide (paraphrased)
"Since the early Java days in the late 1990's , the Jave enterprise platform has grown massively and today is used by a large community of developers. However, the developer community is not homogenous and includes developers who are not expert Java programmers, but are business developers who have core competencies in their industries. As the Java EE platform and community grows, the average programmer skill level is declining.
It's hard to imagine that there is a single developer who understands all aspects of the Java EE platform in depth. The problem to address in Java EE is to provide a technology that empowers developers to build cutting edge web and SOA app's without limiting their agility.
Existing Java frameworks such as Struts, Spring, JSF, EJB, GWT, etc are blankets pulled over areas of complexity that expose simpler controls to work with. Using frameworks, developers no longer work with the java core API's but instead interact with interfaces and services exposed by the framework.
Blah, blah, blah...
What seems a small problem for experienced java developers is another hurdle for business developers who are new to java and EE development. This type of developer may turn to a a single dev environment promising integration of all aspects of app development in a single technology chouice. Developers from a 4GL desktop dev background might be attracted by PLSQL, .NET, Adobe Flash.
An experienced Java developer might see this a a big mistake, but how would those developers know, unless Java too provides a single solution for them? The solution is an end-to-end framework which pulls another blanket over the technologies, one that combines different framewokrs and technologies into a single product that exposes visual and declarative development gestures as it's predominant programming methodology... ADF."
I have been working with ADF since last 6 months, and i realise that ADF is made particularly large application with strong database integration. I haven't seen any other Framework which can provide you with so fast and easy development of database rich applications.
Yes i agree that it have some bugs, but still it works well if you know how to work with it.
My perception of and experience with ADF is that it is a very solid and robust framework (unfortunately, the development tools are not.) I'm not sure there's much competition to it, at least, not from a single framework. ADF itself is really several different frameworks combined over the years into a mostly cohesive product. Now that Oracle owns Java, i really expect (hope) parts/much of ADF finds its way into Java EE-proper so we can maybe see alternative implementations and better development tools. If that were to happen, it'd pretty well solidify ADF's future (as long as Oracle doesn't screw the Java community in the meantime and push them to alternative VM platforms).
If you are already familiar with or want to work with Oracle(-related) products, ADF is what you want. Given the market penetration of Oracle, it's probably a reasonable bet that they'll remain dominant and your skills will remain marketable for years to come. Oracle is spending lots of money and acquiring lots of companies to try to own and retain the enterprise.
The SaaS question, to me, is a little harder to answer. While it does seem to be moving in that direction, it's not clear to me if it's mostly marketing's attempt to give it that push or if business-need is driving it. And there are lots of questions i don't really track such as business trust of the cloud for critical data and reliability.
Short answer:
You developing Enterpise solution, your product vendor is Oracle - ADF is a best choice
You indie developer, your solution is not for enterprise, you not going to use other products in the Oracle stack - ADF is not for you, look for another framework.
Long answer:
If you going to Enterprise, if your general product's stack vendor is Oracle. Your best choise is to go along with ADF. ADF becomes better with each major release. I've started using ADF since 11.1.1.2, had a look at 10.x and now using 12.1.3, while still supporting large enterprise applications on 11.1.1.6.
I see a huge improvement and its really hard to find another product that provide better integration and support for whole Oracle stack.
However, if you quite familiar with other framework or/and not going to use other Oracle products and/or your customers can't afford to pay quite a lot for ADF/Weblogic/DB/ECM etc.. - your best choise is to avoid ADF. Its good for large enterprise solutions.
Yes, in fact actually you can develop using free and limited version of ADF - Essentials, use other app server as tomcat or glassfish, but you'll be better off with the other framework. ADF Essentials is only kickstart to large enterprise world, not a solution for small lightweight application.
Development in ADF is a pain in the heart. For a newcomer, the learning curve is too steep. I wish it could be more like learning dot NET.
From my perspective, learning and constructing a functionality in dot NET takes a quarter of the time to do the same in ADF. Of course, it imbalance reduces as a person learns along, but that's pretty much the scenario for beginners. It's frustrating.
I have been working with ADF since last 3 months, and i can tell you that ADF is a really suitable for situations which is essential to provide fast development process for large enterprise applications with strong database integration.
Compairing to other JavaEE framworks like Spring,
It is extremely complex when fixing bugs becasue of the architechtur of the ADF and lack of dev community relative to Spring. Spring has large development community
around the framework.
It is hard to impliment MVC architecture with the ADF inter component integrations.
Spring Developers have much more reputation and demand compared to ADF developers.
ADF is very slow, heavy-weight, tightly-coupled compared to Spring and integrated framework with Oracle tools.
Hope this will help you to solve your problem and gain your knowledge. Happy coding!!!

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