I’m going to be honest. I love Transformer and PowerPlay cubes. There, I said it. I admit it. Since I have a love for the “older” technology, I was REALLY excited to hear that Dynamic Cubes and Cognos Cube Designer were part of the 10.2 BI release!  However are you having trouble with Dynamic Cubes and SQL?

Dynamic Cubes

For those of you who are not familiar with Dynamic Cubes, it is really Transformer on steroids for big data, as it allows for analyzing terabytes of data quickly and accurately.

Before you can start using this new technology, there are a few things you need to make sure are set up:
1. Your data warehouse must be in a star or snowflake schema format
2. Your data source configuration in Cognos Administration must be set up with JDBC connection
3. Most likely, you will need to download the JDBC drivers from Microsoft’s download area of their website
4. You will need to install them in a couple of places; see this link for exact direction: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21584451
5. Lastly, you will need to make sure you have 32-bit SQL installed, as all connections made through client are 32bit only

Once all of these things are complete, you should be able to launch Cognos Cube Designer and load up the sample model or connect to your own data source and be off and running with Dynamic Cubes.

My next blog will discuss deploying and reporting from Dynamic Cubes.