Monday, May 10, 2010

Burst Reports and Master Detail Relationships

Burst Reports with Master Detail relationships is not a good option to use in Cognos. This seems to be a major issue with Cognos and hope they rectify it soon. When you have reports that have master detail relationships and you need to burst the same, be aware that the report queries will be executed for each burst query group item.

The drawback is that you almost always end up with a report which requires a master detail relationship either because it has multiple pages with each page associated with a different query or some such reason. Its almost impossible to eliminate master detail relationships. And what you end up having because of this is a headache wherein either there is a huge number of queries fired against the DB one after the other or the scheduled process taking time due to the burst reports being executed one after the other.

What IBM needs to do is to have a property that report authors can set as to whether the detail query needs to be run for each master item or if the detail query needs to be executed once and then have it associated / sliced based on the master query.

6 comments:

kishan said...

Hii..Can you help me in Cognos SDK. I have a requirement where i need to read model.xml of framework manager?
Can you help me in this regard?.Thanks in advance.

Zephyr said...

Hi Kishan, I don't have SDK experience. Just attended a training on SDK. But is there any reason why you would need to read Fm through SDK? I feel FM models should be left untouched by any code.

Unknown said...

Have any of you worked on Dynamic subject line when emailing Burst reports. Any input will be appreciated...
Thanks
SP

Zephyr said...

Hi SP, you can drag data items into your subject line thus creating the effect of dynamicity.

So if you have a simple dynamic requirement you can create a data item to create the subject line you want and drag into the subject line section. Let me know if this helps.

Unknown said...

Hi Zephyr, Thanks fro your response. I have a report which bursts to 50 countries every month. I have created a Burst table that contains the burst key info along with the emails of various people that the reports should be bursted to. The problem is each report is delivered with the same burst line, it does not attach the Burst_key to the email.
Can you explain in detail how I would be able to drag and drop the data item in the subject line.

Thanks
SP

Zephyr said...

Hi SP, I was thinking in terms of Event Studio mailing of reports and not bursted reports. I don't think there is anyway you can get a dynamic subject line in that case.