October 8, 2019

As you are planning your IBM Cognos Analytics upgrade you need to ask yourself, “Is Your Cognos Analytics Content Store Causing Performance Issues?”

What’s in the Cognos Analytics Content Store?

Your Cognos Content Store holds a lot of information.  It contains Cognos report specifications, scheduling, packages, data source connections, report outputs, etc. Over time your Cognos Content Store is like your garage, it accumulates a lot of clutter. 

Cause of Content Store Bloat

One big contributor to Content Store bloat is when the end users’ MyFolders content gets out of control.   Years ago, self-service was just a dream. Most end users didn’t really create their own content they just ran reports. But over the years IBM Cognos has become more self-service friendly. Unfortunately, as end users create their own content, they often have multiple versions of the same thing. This can cause Content Store bloat. If too large, the size of your Cognos Analytics Content Store can slow performance and create instability. So yes, size does matter.

Declutter Your Cognos Content Store

There are a few steps all Cognos Administrators should do to help prevent their Cognos Analytics Content Store from causing performance issues.

1. Turn on Cognos Analytics Auditing to understand what’s being used and what is not. Check out this ​IBM Video for turning auditing on. 
2. Identify Orphaned content with consistency checks. Orphaned content typically happens when an end user who has created content and stored it in their MyFolders leaves the organization.  The user is removed from security but their content stays and becomes orphaned. This content should either be removed or assigned to someone else. 
3. Create guidelines for the number of versions retained. Saved report output is stored in the content store database, so it’s recommended you retain the least number of copies. This is possible by modifying the report output versions settings in a report's properties.
4. IBM Cognos Content Archival allows you to store archived content in an external repository, this helps reduce the size of the content store and could help performance. See IBM Cognos Analytics Administration and Security Guide for more details. 
5. As a Cognos Administrator you can leverage the Content Removal option to remove output versions in the Public Folder or MyFolders.

For more ideas on how you can declutter your Cognos Analytics Content Store so it doesn’t cause performance issues, click here to join our Lodestar Solutions’ Cognos Analytics Club. 

Once you join you will have access to our latest video on this topic as well as many other informative videos for Cognos Analytics Administrators looking to get the most out of their Cognos Analytics Upgrade.

Motio Tools to Improve the Content Store

Cognos Administrators should evaluate Motio Tools when planning their upgrades. Motio has tools that can help you declutter your content store.  Please refer to our previous blog on this topic. IBM and Motio have created an agreement that benefits you! You can leverage MotioCI for 30 days. For more information on Motio products check out their feature Matrix. 

Lodestar Solutions, Inc. is a reseller of Motio products so we are available to answer any questions you have. Just email us at services@lodestarsolutions.com.