Hi David.
Cognos offers a product called Analytic Applications for J.D. Edwards
OneWorld.
It is broken into modules, so you can just purchase the financial module if
you like.
It is made of a predesigned ETL scripts to extract the data from JDE and load
it into the predefined Data Warehouse and some predesigned PowerCubes and
Reports that build from this warehouse. I generally consider the product a
beginning framework and the expectation is to build upon it with in house
developers or outside consultants. The ETL engine (i.e. DecisionStream) can
connect via ODBC (which we use to connect to our AS/400) but it can also use
more efficient means to connect via the native database clients (e.g. TDS for
SQL Server and SQL*Net for Oracle, etc).
As far as direct connect, sound like you may be dealing the MOLAP vs. ROLAP
question. Cognos is MOLAP which may not suit your VP's requirements in that
the power cubes stored the data and are rebuilt on timed intervals (nightly
for us) to update/refresh the data.
You might need to check out MicroStrategy in that they are a ROLAP product and
pull the relevant data directly from the RDBMS on the fly (i.e. Real time
results).
The upside with MS is concurrency of the data, the downside is performance the
the overhead on your production OLTP system. If you have a SAN solution, you
could look shadows copies of the production database to a separate partition
from where these OLAP activities can take place to spare the load on your JDE
database.
Regards