Cognos Transformer (Cubes) and Framework Manager
Updated June 10, 2014
Cognos Transformer (Cubes) and Framework Manager
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Analysis Studio
- Framework Manager
- Transformer
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos Analysis Studio
I am currently not using this product, but have used it in the past to create cubes for business analysts (usually in the financial dept.)
- Cognos Transformer is an excellent product for buildling data marts (cubes) from a data warehouse. It is easy to learn and pretty powerful. Also, while it does have some quirks, I haven't run across that many bugs (compared to some software products I use).
- Framework Manager does take some skill and knowledge to get started, but once you understand the concepts it is a great administrative tool. It makes it easy to give the users the view of data they are looking for. You can handle joins, etc. behind the scenes so the users don't need to understand relational databases.
- I have used this tool off and on and its relative simplicity makes it easy to re-learn after 3-5 years.
- It's one of the easiest ways I have seen to build dimensional models. Hopefully IBM won't try to 'upgrade' Transformer.
- Framework Manager can sometimes be a little buggy. Versions were hard to control.
- There are some quirks in Transformer, like spelling of fields, etc. must match throughout or Transformer can't match them, etc. Fairly minor in the big picture.
- Users can easily develop Dashboards based on Cognos Cubes and Report. Drill-through reports are relatively easy to create giving the users access to all levels of data.
Some alternatives include Business Objects and Crystal Reports. I do not have experience with either to really say which is best. There are also open source tools like Pentaho.