Calculations in Dimensional Query Subjects

A long time back while working on a relational ad-hoc package request I ran into an issue. I have been unable to explain the cause for it and the solution involved a work-aound that I am unhappy with. I am posting it here hoping that someone might be able to offer a better solution or even validate my reasoning on the issue.

Let us assume the ad-hoc package involves the query subjects - Product, Revenue and Forecast. Product behaves like a dimension due to being on the 1 side of the 1-N relationship to the other 2 query subjects. I have created a calculation say Calc A in the Product Query subject. The package also has a stand-alone calculation say Calc B defined as Revenue / calc A.

In Query Studio, when you drag Product and Calc B the data is off. The SQL generated by Cognos involves a min on Calc A even if aggregates are set to Total or Sum.Including the function Total inside of Calc A also doesn't help. No determinants are involved as the fact tables are at the same granularity and join to the dimensions at the same granularity.

My assumption on this issue now is that Cognos treats Product as a Dimension and hence includes a Min on the dimensional data item.

My work-around to the above issue was to create a shortcut to Product and join it to Product with a cardinality to make this behave like a fact. This has the downside of the table being queried twice and involves a stitched query when calc B is pulled into the query. Since the Dimension table in my case was not huge there wasn't much performance impact.

I will otherwise have to manipulate cardinalities to make Cognos treat Product as a fact which is not advisable as it impacts other queries and still will not remove the stitched query. Any thoughts on this?
  

Cognos 8.4 Query Studio Bug - Including Model and Query Filter

Recently I ran into an issue with Cognos 8.4 Query Studio. When I try to include both a model filter and a query studio filter the query studio report just hangs forever and then it throws an "object not found" error on the Model filter even though the object exists in the model.

This has been identified as a bug in Cognos 8.4 and seems to have been corrected in version 8.4.1.

So here's one more reason to move to 8.4.1.