Are You a Chicken or a Pig?

• What did I do since yesterday
• What am I going to do today
• What is preventing me from doing what I need to do

These are very simple questions that take minimal effort to identify the answers but the answers are keys to keeping the project fluid.   The standup meeting also promotes a team environment and keeps momentum moving.

In a BI Reporting environment, BSP's Thin Slice works very well, with continuous delivery of reports to the user base.

Utilizing the Thin Slice or Scrum methodologies, the deliverables become the building blocks for the next Sprint.  The concept of controlling change is probably the most difficult but is also the most important.  This control lies in the responsibility of the Pigs.  This pretense conflicts with how many implementations are done.  Generally the project content, including change, is driven by the key Business Users or Project Sponsor, the Chickens. 

1. Entirely new user interface that is more powerful and intuitive
2. Support for unlimited number of IBM Cognos environments with any number of LDAPs securing them.
3. Support for any security methods supported by Cognos (basic signon, OS Signon, SiteMinder protected, etc.)
4. Fix now support in Report Validator to let you fix one or more reports by dragging the appropriate query item from the current package when packages have been updated and reports are impacted.
5. Powerful new impact analysis that allows previews to content to be viewed side by side with current content either graphically or with a file compare of the underlying XML.  Once approved, changes can be applied.
6. New content store tree that allows for sophisticated object search through UI or advanced SearchPath mode.
   a. Favorite searches can be saved
   b. Favorite locations in the content store (public and personal) can be saved.
7. Powerful and unlimited find / replace capabilities within any type of object (scoped at the entire specification).
8. Multiple search replace capability simultaneously.
9. Ability to add or remove Portal Tabs, and set Portal Tabs as homepage
10. Support for more types of objects in all modules.
11. Command line support for all modules
12. Tremendous performance improvements.
13. Hundreds more!

In the event you missed it, we will be hosting one final webinar for 2008 on Friday, December 19th.  Register here.

• Dual 2.66Ghz Quad-core processors
• 16GB RAM
• Windows 2003 Enterprise Server x64 R2 SP2
• SQL Server 2005 Enterprise x64

We kept getting a cryptic error message "Software Exception."  We were monitoring the SQL Server, as well as the DM Server, and all looked fine, then everything just stopped. When we checked the box to "Use file caching for attributes," it ran fine and reported that it 'created' a 4+GB file for the attributes, yet only used about 750MB of memory.

IBM Cognos Articles of Interest

• Building a Generic Drill-through report
• Drill into a Multi-level PDF Using Bookmarks

Did You Know...

• You can create processes to populate dimensions.
• The processes to build dimensions and cubes can be scheduled to run at pre-determined intervals..
• You can create a process using a variety of data sources including a TM1 Cube.

About Pencils...

• The word pencil derives from the Latin "penicillus," meaning -- not so sensibly -- "little tail."
• Pencil marks are made when tiny graphite flecks, often just thousandths of an inch wide, stick to the fibers that make up paper.
• Graphite, a crystallized form of carbon, was discovered near Keswick, England, in the mid-16th century. An 18th-century German chemist, A. G. Werner, named it, sensibly enough, from the Greek "graphein," meaning "to write."
• The average pencil holds enough graphite to draw a line about 35 miles long or to write roughly 45,000 words. History does not record anyone testing this statistic.
• French pencil boosters include
  • Nicolas-Jacques Conté, who patented a clay-and-graphite manufacturing process in 1795;
  • Bernard Lassimone, who patented the first pencil sharpener in 1828;
  • and Therry des Estwaux, who invented an improved mechanical sharpener in 1847.
• French researchers also hit on the idea of using caoutchouc, a vegetable gum now known as rubber, to erase pencil marks. Until then, writers removed mistakes with bread crumbs.
• In 1861, Eberhard Faber built the first American mass-production pencil factory in New York City.
• Pencils were among the basic equipment issued to Union soldiers during the Civil War.
• More than half of all pencils come from China. In 2004, factories there turned out 10 billion pencils, enough to circle the earth more than 40 times. 
• Pencils can write in zero gravity and so were used on early American and Russian space missions -- even though NASA engineers worried about the flammability of wood pencils in a pure-oxygen atmosphere, not to mention the menace of floating bits of graphite. 
• The world's largest pencil is a Castell 9000, on display at the manufacturer's plant near Kuala Lumpur. Made of Malaysian wood and polymer, it stands 65 feet high. 
• If a normal pencil can draw a line 35 miles long, how far would the 65-foot-high Castell 9000 go?
• There is no risk of lead poisoning if you stab yourself (or someone else) with a pencil because it contains no lead -- just a mixture of clay and graphite. Still, pencil wounds carry a risk of infection for the stabees, lawsuits for stabbers.