Cognos? EnterpriseOne Data Model available for Cognos? - not OLAP

[David Tremain]

We are evaluating Cognos for use with our accounting system. Our VP of Finance wants to direct-connect (ODBC?) to live production data (rather than use OLAP).

Does anyone know of an EnterpriseOne datamodel available for Cognos?

Has anyone used Cognos with E1 Accounting directly? What has been your experience?

 

[peterbruce]

David,

We use GOGNOS to report directly from the live tables. However, I am not directly involved and my understanding of COGNOS at the moment is rather rudimentry. As far as I understand we have created our own COGNOS Cube definitions. If you wish I can pass on any questions you have to our COGNOS team.

 

[b_gilmore]

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

 

[vsamudra]

We have done some extensive work on Cognos and JDE. For one, we don't go against live JDE tables (and there are a number of reasons for that decision).
There are various combinations that we have created to satisfy the business reporting needs.

A. Download a subset of JDE tables into a datamart (ODS without altering table structures ) and then query against this data mart/ create canned reports.
B. Create cubes from these tables to address some advanced ad-hoc reorting needs. (These are custom cubes that we have created)
C. Deployed JDE Analytical Applications - which provides a platform for Enterpsise Wide dashboard.

So preety much we have a combination of systems that address the needs of
1. Simple querying (canned reports)
2. Advanced analysis using custom cubes and JDE analytcal application cubes
3. Dashboard for the Management.

We have come up with a data model that spans Sales & Shipping/ Inventory/ Operations/ Procurement / Advanced Pricing and Finance.

Please let me know if you need more information
Thanks
Vaibhav