IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.
$10
per month per user
Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Oracle Data Integrator is an ELT data integrator designed with interoperability other Oracle programs. The program focuses on a high-performance capacity to support Big Data use within Oracle.
IBM Cognos Analytics is the only product that provides pixel-perfect reports right out of the box. You do not need third-party tools to implement it. Secondly, other tools require you to create a relation between the tables if you are going to use them in the report. Only in …
Well suited: Financial reporting - It can handle complex, pixel perfect, muti-page reports with scheduled delivery to stakeholders (like sales report by region on quarterly periodicity) Operational dashboard across departments - It can combine multiple data sources (ERP, CRM, excels etc) with filters, and embedded AI insights Less appropriate: Live dashboards - As stated earlier as well, IBM Cognos Analytics doesn't suit well for live dashboards or event driven data. For ex: live web traffic data or IOT device data, etc Data science - Although IBM Cognos Analytics is great tool for data exploration but it should not be used as a substitute for Python or R, which has edge over advanced modelling and stats based workflows like predictive modelling or clustering
Oracle Data Integrator is well suited in all the situations where you need to integrate data from and to different systems/technologies/environments or to schedule some tasks. I've used it on Oracle Database (Data Warehouses or Data Marts), with great loading and transforming performances to accomplish any kind of relational task. This is true for all Oracle applications (like Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Essbase, Hyperion Financial Management, and so on). I've also used it to manage files on different operating systems, to execute procedures in various languages and to read and write data from and to non-Oracle technologies, and I can confirm that its performances have always been very good. It can become less appropriate depending on the expenses that can be afforded by the customer since its license costs are quite high.
Oracle Data Integrator nearly addresses every data issue that one can expect. Oracle Data Integrator is tightly integrated to the Oracle Suite of products. This is one of the major strengths of Oracle Data Integrator. Oracle Data Integrator is part of the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Suite - which is highly used by various industries. This tool replaced Informatica ETL in Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Suite.
Oracle Data Integrator comes with many pre-written data packages. If one has to load data from Excel to Oracle Database, there is a package that is ready available for them - cutting down lot of effort on writing the code. Similarly, there are packages for Oracle to SQL, SQL to Oracle and all other possible combinations. Developers love this feature.
Oracle Data Integrator relies highly on the database for processing. This is actually an ELT tool rather than an ETL tool. It first loads all the data into target instance and then transforms it at the expense of database resources. This light footprint makes this tool very special.
The other major advantage of Oracle Data Integrator, like any other Oracle products, is a readily available developer pool. As all Oracle products are free to download for demo environments, many organizations prefer to play around with a product before purchasing it. Also, Oracle support and community is a big advantage compared to other vendors.
IBM Cognos Analytics enables customer data segmentation, which is essential for marketing, improving and streamlining purchasing behavior and preferences. This helps companies create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
Our clients Through data analysis, we can identify and observe trends in the behavior of other clients, allowing us to anticipate needs and adjust strategies to avoid consequences.
ODI does not have an intuitive user interface. It is powerful, but difficult to figure out at first. There is a significant learning curve between usability, proficiency, and mastery of the tool.
ODI contains some frustrating bugs. It is Java based and has some caching issues, often requiring you to restart the program before you see your code changes stick.
ODI does not have a strong versioning process. It is not intuitive to keep an up to date repository of versioned code packages. This can create versioning issues between environments if you do not have a strong external code versioning process.
For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.
It is maturing and over time will have a good pool of resources. Each new version has addressed the issues of the previous ones. Its getting better and bigger.
We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.
Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is a reliable ELT tool, supporting data loads from various heterogenous sources. It is effective both for structured as well as non structured data. Its works well for creating translations and transformation and also aids in the data quality checks when combined with an MDM solution. Troubleshooting issues can be of a challenge if it is not configured properly.
Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point
Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.
Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.
Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.
The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us
Make sure that any custom tables that you have, are built into your metadata packages. You can still access them via SQL queries in Cognos, but it is much easier to have them as a part of the available metadata packages.
Power BI is stronger for quick ad-hoc analysis and dashboards, but IBM Cognos Analytics is better when consistency, precision, and mass distribution matter. Tableau is best for interactive analysis, while IBM Cognos Analytics is better for standardized, repeatable enterprise reporting. Sigma shines for customizable dashboards and drill-down analysis while IBM Cognos Analytics holds an edge in data discovery and visualization.
I have used Trifacta Google Data Prep quite a bit. We use Google Cloud Platform across our organization. The tools are very comparable in what they offer. I would say Data Prep has a slight edge in usability and a cleaner UI, but both of the tools have comparable toolsets.
The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.
