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"Sheikh's Inheritance"
Consider this :
An Arab sheikh tells his two sons to race their camels to a distant city to see who will inherit his fortune. The one whose camel is slower wins. After wandering aimlessly for days, the brothers ask a wise man for guidance. Upon receiving the advice, they jump on the camels and race to the city as fast as they can.
What did the wise man say to them?
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Geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure. A geocacher can place a geocache anywhere in the world, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache's existence and location online. For more, click here. 
BSP's NJ office has sent a Geocache to our HQ in Chicago, and you can help get it there!
To Track Progress click Here! |
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Join COGNOiSe.com, the largest independent, worldwide FREE IBM Cognos Support Community.
Access our
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| Greetings!
Welcome to this month's BSP Newsletter. We have a lot of educational content this month, along with some great tips and tricks and other IBM Cognos related information as always! And remember, we enjoy hearing your suggestions regarding the content you'd like to see. Please e-mail us at Newsletter@brightstarpartners.com if you have a topic you'd like to see discussed in future newsletters. |
By  Dustin Adkison, Technical Sales
COGNOiSe.com, the world's largest, independent community of IBM Cognos users, is a free community that is owned and hosted by BrightStar Partners. This site serves as first-line support for many users through the Forum area, where almost 800 new posts are created each month. With over 9,000 active members worldwide active within these forums, posting can be an excellent way to learn and grow your Cognos implementation skills while leveraging ideas from your peers across the globe.
With over 9,000 registered users and 200,000 visits to the site each month, COGNOiSe.com is an excellent resource for learning more about Cognos products from the people who really know: the users. In an effort to further expand our reach, we are now posting articles to the main page written by our consultants and detailing many different tips and techniques that are being utilized by our clients. If you would like to contribute an article, please contact Dustin Adkison at dadkison@brightstarpartners.com.
If your article is chosen, your name and company name will be displayed along with your article on our main page.
Finally, if you would like to join the COGNOiSe.com community, we would love to have you. You can sign-up absolutely free at:
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BSP IMPLEMENTING FIRST IBM COGNOS EXPRESS CUSTOMER | |
| IBM Cognos Express set to Launch, and BSP is at the Forefront!
IBM Cognos launches IBM Cognos Express later this month! . BrightStar Partners has been working closing with the Cognos Express team and has brought to IBM the first Express customer, whose implementation is already underway. Stay tuned over the coming months for more information about this exciting new offering and the successes we're helping to generate.
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| ANOTHER REFERENCEABLE CUSTOMER |
 Featuring Andrew Weiss, Director of Product Development
We recently received a help request from a customer trying to update a model to reflect a database change after inadvertently breaking their model. The customer was nervous because the issue resulted in a large number of broken production reports, and the clock was ticking until the morning came around! . They were hoping that MetaManager (which they own) would be able to help to resolve the issues before the users logged in the next morning.
The problem! The structure of the detail table, which is the core of all of the relationships in this massive application, had been modified. In an effort to fix the issue, they deleted and recreated some objects in the model. Inadvertently this caused more problems. All of the reports were reporting runtime errors because Cognos wanted to create a cross join between the query subjects from different namespaces.
The Solution! With midnight rapidly approaching, we determined that one of the shortcuts was incorrect and recreated it. The model was working properly again, and reports were no longer trying to create cross joins. However, we still had our initial problem, the database change. This is where MetaManager took over. Report Validator was used to search all reports authored off of the applicable packages, and all broken reports were quickly identified, along with their respective issues. The Fix Report feature was then used to effectively drag & drop the new Query Items over top of the old invalid Query Items. When the re-mapping was completed, a click sent this information to the Find / Replace module so that every single report built off of this package could be inspected, updated as necessary, and re-validated.
Though this particular ticket was not BSP product related, we took this customer's problem on as our own and stayed on the call until the problem was resolved and the production system was whole again.
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MANAGE SECURITY MEMBERSHIPS WITH EASE!
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New Features and Capabilities Within MetaManager's Security Editor Allow Drag-and-Drop and Import Capabilities!
Security Editor is designed to provide an easy to use drag and drop interface for managing Memberships and Permissions on Groups, Roles, and almost any object within the Content Store. In addition, the module supports importing folders, roles and groups as well as membership assignments.
To see how easy Security Editor is to use, click here.
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| FRAMEWORK MANAGER - MANAGING RELATIONSHIPS |
 By Jason Arnold, Senior Consultant
It can be a challenge to maintain and organize Framework Manager projects as they get larger. The more query subjects and relationships in a model the harder they are to interpret. This simple technique will help make query subject relationships easier to manage and understand.
Always name the relationship with the name of the fact query subject first and the dimension query subject second.
Example: FACT_TABLE <--> DIMENSION_TABLE
Then view the relationships from the Explorer tab. Select the View menu, then Views submenu and choose List. All of the relationships between each fact and dimension will be sorted together. Simple, Yes, but it really makes troubleshooting and adding additional relationships a breeze.
You can also have Framework Manager name each of the relationships for you, with the name of the fact first and the dimension second, by follows these steps.
Select the key in the fact query subject first
Hold ctrl, then click on the key in the corresponding dimension query subject
Both of the keys should now be selected, right-click on one of them, choose Create Relationship
The relationship is now created between the selected keys and it's named properly.
Click here to view the technique with screenshots. |
| IBM COGNOS ARTICLES OF INTEREST |
 About Snakes......
- The snake today forms part of the symbol of physicians and veterinarians (the snake is wrapped around Asklepios' staff), linking snakes to millennia of healing and medical practice.
- The hognosed snake (Heterodon sp.), grass snake and the spitting cobra can feign death by flipping on to their backs when threatened. They open their mouths, allow their tongues to loll and can empty a foul smelling substance from their anal glands, making them highly unappetizing to any potential predator.
- Many snakes, such as vipers, boas and pythons have temperature-sensing organs on their heads. These heat pits are sensitive to changes in temperature of as little as 0.002 degrees Celsius, and effectively allow the snake to navigate and hunt in the dark.
- Snakes can have over 300 pairs of ribs.
- Snakes turn "blue" before a shed. This opaque change to the skin is actually due to the presence of a lymph-like layer of fluid between the old and new skins, prior to the shed of the old skin.
- The smallest snake may be the Martinique thread snake (Leptotyphlops bilineatus), which does not grow any bigger than 4 1/4 inches.
- A snake's heart can slide 1 to 1 1/2 times its length from its normal position, to allow the passage of swallowed prey. This is because of the relative mobility of the pericardial sac, which surrounds the heart.
- Venom glands have evolved independently in several species. Venoms are very complex substances, which may consist of a dozen or more toxic components. These can include substances poisonous to the heart, nerves and DNA as well as enzymes that break down natural tissue barriers, allowing the spread of venom within the body.
- Spitting cobras can inject venom in their bites, but can also force venom out, under pressure, through tiny channels in their fangs. Raising the front half of its body, the snake can aim venom at the eyes and mucous membranes of its target, over 3 feet away.
- When the tongue is in the mouth, it lies in a sheath beneath the glottis with its tip touching the vomeronasal or Jacobsen's organ. This is an organ of smell, so when your snake flicks out his tongue, he is, in fact, "tasting" or smelling the air. The forked design allows the snake to detect on which side the smell is strongest, and so to locate his prey, even in the dark.
- The Brahminy blind snake are all females. When mature, they lay fertile eggs, and the young are clones of the mother. Although native to Asia, this snake is now found in warm countries all over the world.
- The Emerald tree boa is born red or yellow, and changes to green after about a year.
- The rattlesnake's rattle consists of six to 10 layers of scales, which fail to shed and make that distinctive sound when the tail is shaken as a warning. Eventually the older segments will slough as the rattle lengthens.
- The common egg eater (Dasypeltis scabra) is a highly specialized snake. Although it is not venomous, the markings are sufficiently similar to those of the deadly cobra or viper that a potential predator will think twice before attacking. The egg eater can also expand its jaws to mimic the larger head of the venomous. To consume an egg, the jaws can expand to four or five times the size of the egg. Once engulfed, the egg is pierced by two specialized vertebrae. Other modified bones in the vertebral column stabilize it, prevent its slipping out of the mouth or further into the snake. Yet another set of unique vertebrae crush the egg. Once emptied of its contents, the shell is regurgitated.
- The black mamba (Dendroaspis polylepsis) is brown, gray or olive, but never black. It is a particularly dangerous snake, with a bite that kills 95 to 100 percent of victims. The black mamba may also be the fastest snake, reaching speeds of 10 to 12 miles per hour. Other particularly dangerous snakes include the common krait, Russell's viper (both Asian snakes) and the taipan (Australian). Seven of the 10 most deadly snakes live in Australia.
- Snakes move by relaxing and contracting muscles lengthwise along the body. Sidewinding is a specialized form of motion that allows a snake to travel with speed and relatively little expenditure of energy along loose desert sand. The snake lifts a loop of its body from the surface, using its head and tail. The loop is moved sideways and then back to the ground. This creates the typical series of unconnected parallel tracks.
- The paired claw-like structures seen on either side of the vent of a snake such as a ball or royal python are, in fact, remnants of the legs present in the animals from which the modern species has evolved.
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