Limited Cache, Query Re-Use Capabilities

I have always had a major complaint with Cognos and that is with regards to caching and query re-use. I am not sure if this is the case with other BI tools as well. And it is really frustrating when you have to explain this to the users.

For instance you are asked to implement dynamic sorting on your report that includes a number of columns and retrieves a huge amount of data. Now with Dynamic sorting each sort fires a query against the DB which is performance impacting. And when you explain this to the users their query is "Why doesn't Cognos just retrieve the data and push it to the client side, so that each sort would not hit the DB?" Good question, but that is not for me to answer.

Likewise imagine a scenario where you have to display 3 Lists in your report one each for YTD, QTD and WTD. Ideally what I would like to do is to get the YTD data and QTD, WTD would all be a subset of the YTD data. So if the YTD data can be retrieved and cached and this data re-used for the other queries that would be great. But unfortunately that is not the case with Cognos. When I create a query object and point other query objects to this the base query still gets executed multiple times.

These are all required features in Cognos.

The only cache and query re-use capabilities Cognos offers is when you have multiple lists all pointing to the same query and having the same order by, group by and columns which is ever rarely the case.