300+ [MOSK ASKED] Ibm Cognos Interview Questions and Answers

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1. What Is Meant By Alternate Drill Down With Ex?

Alternate drill down path me there will be two path to opt. For example- We will have time dimension now the client requirement is they want two type of year -one is calender year(Jan-Dec) and another is fiscal year(Apr-Mar).

2. What Is Log In Cognos?

While creating reports or creating models logs have all information till session closed.

3. What Is The Difference Between Filter And Condition?

A Filter is a restriction that reduces the amount of data displayed in the report.
The report filters are non-reusable and specific to the report.
Filters are

  • before aggregation: non-aggregated records are filtered(details record)
  • after aggregation: summary records are filtered

4. What Is Cognos Powerhouse And What Is It Used For?

Cognos Powerhouse is High-Productivity Application Development Solutions equips you with high-productivity development environments for creating your data-driven business solutions faster,whether for Web-based, client/server, or traditional terminal-based access. PowerHouse has gained a worldwide reputation for productivity, reliability, performance, and flexibility.

5. What Is Trformer?

Trformer is used for building the Cubes (Multidimensional Structure used for OLAP processing).

6. What Is The Difference Between Enterprise Data Warehouse And Data Warehouse?

Big Organizations have a lot of diversified sources of data.There might be a dataware house exclusively for trport and others for data related to the project the company runs.In such case the complete enterprise’s(company’s) data warehouse is a big combination of all and is known the Enterprise data Warehouse(EDW).

7. What Is Cube Size?

2.0 GB (It depends on your project requirements).

8. How You Provide Security To Reports? How You Provide Security To Packages ?

For framework manager packages, before you head away with creating a new package it asks whether or not you want to have security set up for the package in use. Even if you haven’t defined any security at this stage, you can always goto the actions >> package >> Edit package settings and there you can define the security settings for the package.

For reports, you can either give report-level or folder- level security by going to the properties of that and choosing suitable roles/user groups that are supposed to be entitled to view/modify/create reports.

9. What Is The Difference Between Group And Association?

  • In cognos ‘group’ is used to suppress the duplicate values. And ‘associate’ is used to suppress the values if it is one-one relationship.
  • Group – It Eliminates the Duplicate values from the report break the columns. Its having a one to many relationship.
  • Association-It Eliminates the Duplicate values from the report and its having one-one relationship.
  • Both Group & Association eliminate duplicates in a column.But we cannot use Association alone.It should have one to one relationship with grouped column.
  • Using Association is a performance enhancement technique.

     

10. What Are The Different Ways Of Adding Data In Trformer?

In trformer you import metadata from architect or catalog to create a cube. We just import metadata. we don’t add data to it.

11. What Is The Importance Of Dimension In The Cognos.?

Without Dimension and Fact cannot make a relation between tables it could not be use for joins and retrieve the data as a form of reports in cognos. Dimension is a major subject area through which we can analysis our business.

12. What Is Drill Down And Slicing And Dicing Whats The Difference Between Them?

Drilling lets you quickly move from one level of detail to another to explore different aspects of your business.
Drilling down moves you down in the hierarchy.
drilling up moves you up in the hierarchy.
Slicing and Dicing While you can drill to look at information at any level, you can slice and dice to select the exact information you want in your report.

13. What Are The Special Features In Cognos Reportnet?

CRN is web based tool. So it will very useful to view the reports very easily. So that they preferred CRN

14. What Is The Security Module Used In Cognos?

The security module used in cognos is cognos access manager.

15. What You Mean By Drill Across And What Is The Difference Between Drill Through, Drill Across?

Drill across me when you are moving from one report to another report like country in one report and States in another Report whereas if the report is using same report from moving from country to state. In other when you are moving details level if you are using the different report it is drill across and if you are using same report it is drill through.

16. What Junk Dimension Contains?

it contains the miscellaneous attributes such as flags , which does belong to the main dimension table.

for eg; In a sales order fact table ,some informations like, web-order , whether this is a online order or not new_cust-Is this person a new customer , verification- whether the order has been verified.

17. What Are Products Of Cognos?

Cognos 6.6 7.0,7.3(PowerPlay, Impromptu)–ReportNet1.0,1.1mr1, 1.1mr22—ReportNet 8.0(latest)IWR is use by Impromptu to publish reports, PPES is used by PP, Cognos Connection is used by repornet. there are many other tools but these are the main.

18. What Is Query Subject?

A query subject is the basic building block in Framework Manager. A query subject is a set of query items that have an inherent relationship.

19. How To Create Measures And Dimensions?

By using the Framework Manager we can create measures and dimensions according to our business needs.

20. How To Configure The Cognos Configurations To Work In The Windows 2000 Server Machine?

Go to Cognos Configuration and see the settings for cognos in the explorer page. There you can set for win2000 server.

21. What Is Report Item?

Report item is nothing but a query item when it is drag and drop into the work area.
Example in Go sales and retailers package-> Product (is a query subject) and-> Product line is(a query item)->when PL is dropped into the work area then its a report item.

22. How Do Add Dynamic Titles In Pp?

PowerplayFrom format menu–>title, header & footer–>title–>insert report filename.

23. Suppose You Run A Report With Empty Data, How Will You Inform The End User That It Has No Data While Running The Report In Report Studio? Is It Possible, If So How?

Add a list footer and a text messsage inside “No Data”. create a boolean conditional variable “Test” with code “rownum()>0”. Select the complete list footer and set Style Variable, if Yes, Box Type of the List footer should be set to “none”. 

24. What Is Model And How To Create Model And How To Test Model?

Create a Model In framework Manager and then publish it, make sure that Model meets the requirements, don’t overload the model with unwanted query items.

Model is nothing but a project. And the project will be created by framework manager in which we can extract the metadata from the various operational sources… we will test the model by using the TOAD.

Model contains meta data which is related to business reporting Information. We import this data from the data base. Using this metadata we are creating Packages, Publishing packages, This metadata contains query subjects and namespaces.

25. What Is Difference Between Drill Through And Drill Down?

drill through allows you to navigate from summary to detailed information.

drill down also similar kind of thing,for example will do drill down on year if we drill down on this the next level will come me year contains quaters, it contains

  • months,
  • months contains weeks,
  • week contains days.

so,we can view all the levels through drill down.

26. How You Migrate Reports To Cognos 8 From Previous Versions?

using deplyement tool we can migrate the reports.

27. How Many Levels Can Be Used In Drill Through Reports?

Two levels: summary and detail.

28. What Is The Difference Between A Cascading Report And Drillthru Report?why Do We Go For Drill Thru Report?

Cascading report works based on the condition but drill thru work based on the data item what we select as a drill thru options.

29. What Is The Difference Between Macros And Prompt?

Macro is set of instructions to run report.

Prompt is just like a dialog box which will ask user to select/enter the information what he needs.

 

30. How Can We Create A Dynamic Column Name In Cognos?

Select Properties, and then click the Headers/Footers tab.

31. How Can I Convert A List Report/cross Tab Report In Cognos Ep Series Into A Bar Chart Or Pie Chart Etc.?

This can be done in Impromptu administrator.

32. What Are The Enhancements In Cognos Reportnet ?

Enhancements in Cognos reportnet is Cognos 1.0, 1.1, MR1.1, MR1.2 Cognos 1.0,1.1, MR1.1, MR1.2 AND cognos 8, 8.1.1MR, 8.1.2MR, now new version is 8.2

Enhancement in cognos in the list report:-

  • Apply list column title styles
  • Apply list column body styles
  • Apply table styles.

33. What Are The Limitations Of Cognos Reportnet? What Are The Enhancements In Reportnet ?

ADVANTAGES:

  • PURELY WEB BASED REPORTING TOOL
  • WE CAN CREATE MULTILINGUAL REPORTS
  • IT CAN SUPPORT ANY TYPE OF OPERATING SYSTEM & DATA BASE
  • WE CAN CREATE SINGLE MODEL IN FRAMEWORK MANAGER COMING FROM MULTIPLE DATA SOURCES

DISADVANTAGES:

  • WE CAN’T DRILL DOWN AND DRILL UP
  • IT CAN’T SUPPORT MULTI DIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS

34. What Is Cognos Visualizer And Cognos Scripting?

Visualizer is a representation of data cubes in a dashboard format. We can drill through to the ground level of a hierarchy as like in power play report but cannot add or remove fields dynamically.

Cognos script editor : We can write cognos macros or programs in this tool and can fine tune or process some execution.

35. What Is Snapshot ?

A Snapshot is a Permanent Local Copy Of the Report.Snapshot is Static Data Source it is saved with .imr File it is suitable for Disconnected Network.

36. How Create Measures And Demensions?

You can create measure once you import all the data into the data source.You can create measures and dimensions by draging the required source from datasource into dimension map and measure tab.(need to find scope of measures for all the dimensions)

37. How You Burst The Reports? If You Are Bursted Reports Is Not Reached To Destination How You Identify?when You Import Data Into Catalog You Have Complex Columns Names. How Do You Change The Name Of Th

First you have to click on column header which you have to change. Then in property pane you will found name option. Then change column name.

38. How Many Numbers Of Cubes Can We Create On A Single Model? How Can We Navigate Between Those Cubes?

Using a single Model, we can create as many number of cubes u want. By using the dimension views…etc. Regarding the navigation, when we save cubes, these act as separator multidimensional databases. There wont be any relations. Navigate me opening the cubes separately.

39. Can Reportnet Supports Cubes?

No

40. How Can I Test Reports In Cagnos?

In cognos report net by the validate report option a report can be tested. If there will be any error, it will specify the error, unless it will give message -‘report specification is valid’.

After creating the report we will connect to the oracle and we will write the sql query and we will compare this 2 reports .

41. What Are Slowly Changing Dimensions? Why We Are Used Scd?

Slowly Changing Dimensions are those whose data are not fixed.

SCD types:
SCD type 1: Whose data is not fixed.
Historical data are not saved. Data keeps on changing.-> Current Data

SCD type 2: Whose data is fixed and also save historical data.

SCD type 3: Like SCD type 2 only but save historical data in another table. In one table data will updated and in another table historical data will be there.

 

42. What Is The Difference Between List Report And Crosstab Report?

List report show data in rows and columns versus a cross tab report show data in grids with dimension in rows and columns and measures in cells or in the intersection points.

List Report and Cross tab report both contains rows and columns but difference is list report is a detail report for analysis whereas cross tab report is the intersection of data or summarized data for analysis.

43. What Are The Names Of The Reports That You Prepared?

  • List report, Cross tab report, pie charts etc.
  • Master detail, Drill through, CascadingList, Cross tab, Chart, Map report are the basic report of Cognos.

44. How Can I Change Reports To Another Package?

Open that report and save as that reportSelect public folder and then select package in which package you want to save then save it.

45. What Are The Migration Tools Available In The Market With Respect To Cognos Such As Impromptu Reports Are Migrated To Cognos Reportnet?

Reportnet1.1 migration tool is available to migrate the impromptu report to reportnet.

46. What Are Versions Of Cognos From Starting Release To Latest In The Market?

  • EP7 series is the oldest cognos series.
  • cognos report net is the next series.
  • cognos 8.@
  • cognos 8.3 is the latest version.
  • but most of the companies use cognos 8.@

47. What Is Drill Down And Slicing And Dicing What Are The Difference Between Them?

  • Drill down me it will explains the summary level information to lowest level information.
  • Slicing is nothing but cutting edge of the cube.
  • Dicing is nothing but viewing the cube in all possible directions.
  • Drill down is the way to get the more detailed data.
  • Slicing and dicing is to get the data according to where clause.

48. What Is Associated Grouping? And How It Works In Cognos Impromptu?

You can associate one or more data items with a grouped data item. An associated data item should have a one-to-one relationship with the grouped data item. For example, Order No. is a grouped data item.
For each order number, there is an Order Date. Order No. and Order Date have a one-to-one relationship.

49. How To Create Cubes In Trformer ?

  • Cube can be created by using different data sources.
  • Data sources: iqd, tex file Cube creation by using iqd data sources.
  • These iqd sources are coming from impromptu.

50. What Is Cardinality?

Cardinality is nothing but relation between tables like

  • One to One,
  • One to Many and
  • Many to Many.

Cardinality is the nature of the relationship. 1-1,1-many relationships Cardinality is the nature of the relation between two query items.