With the release of Cognos 10.2, IBM Cognos introduced a new data modeler tool called IBM Cognos Dynamic Cubes.  Essentially, Dynamic cubes is an extension of Dynamic Query that leverages in-memory data to achieve high performance interactive analysis and reporting over terabytes of warehouse data.  Very important – you must have a data warehouse structured in a star or snowflake schema in order to maximize the performance!

This isn’t a replacement for Power Cubes or TM1 cubes; these product offerings still work well for smaller amounts of data coming from an operational or transactional system.  Dynamic cubes was added to the product offering to enable high-speed interactive analysis on fact table rows that exceed 20 – 25 million; as Dimensionally Modeled Relation(DMR) or OLAP generally work well on data sets less than that.

Cognos Dynamic Cubes are modeled with a modeling tool called IBM Cognos Cube Designer, which connects directly to the data warehouse and uses the relationships between fact tables and dimension tables to help accelerate the creation of cubes.  Think transformer but bigger!

Once cubes are created, you utilize the normal BI interfaces such as Report Studio, Business Workspace and Business Workspace Advanced.

Currently, the following databases are supported – IBM DB2, IBM Netezza, SQL Server, Oracle and Teradata.  There are no additional license roles that need to be purchased.  Existing roles such as Administrator and Modeler apply for Dynamic Cubes.