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"A Ping-Pong Ball in a Hole"
Your last good ping-pong ball fell down into a narrow metal pipe imbedded in concrete one foot deep.
How can you get it out undamaged, if all the tools you have are your tennis paddle, your shoe-laces, and your plastic water bottle, which does not fit into the pipe?
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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. |
BRIGHTSTAR PARTNERS HOSTED IBM CUSTOMER SUPPORT PORTAL WEBINAR | |
On February 25th BrightStar Partners in partnership with IBM Cognos Customer Support hosted a webinar featuring the "New Face of IBM Support." David Steward and Jason Salares, both of IBM Cognos Customer Support, walked nearly 500 attendees through numerous aspects of the IBM Customer Support Portal.
This webinar featured navigation tips and techniques, methods to access and search the knowledge base, options to customize the Support Portal for your preferences, and how to use the Service Request (SR) Tool to create and manage service request tickets. This webinar was recorded and is available directly from our website at http://www.brightstarpartners.com/supportwebinar.php |
| BSP SOFTWARE HELPS AUDIT IBM COGNOS LICENSE USAGE & ACTIVITY |
One of the most common requests we hear from our customer base is the need to understand if they have enough or too many IBM Cognos licenses.
Until recently, the answer has been to make the best out of the Audit package.
That answer just got better for one of our Integrate Version Control customers! Partnering with this customer we were able to extend the monitoring and broadcast messaging capabilities of IVC to include Studio Usage Tracking by user per day.
We now have a report that clearly indicates how many people are using each studio, who they are and how often they use it.
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| MANAGING SCHEDULED REPORTS - THE EASY WAY |
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Scheduling reports to run within Cognos is a simple and powerful way to disseminate information. Users can create schedules without the involvement of IT, and though this fosters self service, it often lacks insight by administrators as to what schedules are running and when.
BSP's Scheduled Email Extractor enables users to extract vital information on all scheduled reports. The resulting content is saved in a spreadsheet. In addition, this month's podcast shows you how to use MetaManager's powerful enhanced treeview and SearchPath functionality to find running report schedules for users no longer using Cognos and delete those schedules. This video dives into detail on how to use the Advanced SearchPath mode and is recommended for all power users.
To view this and other tips and techniques in the BSP Software Podcast Channel, please visit the newly designed podcast channel here: http://www.bspsoftware.com/podcasts. | |
DIMENSIONAL MODELING AND THE ERD |
 By SJ Van Jaarsveld, Senior Consultant
Dimensional modeling is the design technique of choice for data warehouses and it is in contrast with relational modeling. A dimensional model contains a Fact table, and a set of smaller Dimension tables. The fact table contains a multi-part key and typically also contains a set of measures. The dimension tables contain single-part keys that match to one of the components of the multi-part key in the fact table, and it contains all the descriptive attributes of the dimension.
A relational model normalizes data and removes data redundancy, which benefits the transactional systems using it. The result is a model with many logical entities, that is difficult to understand for the end user, and reporting queries using it can perform poorly.
Although a dimensional model is the optimal data source for a Framework Manager model, far too often we find ourselves with only a relational data source available, and have to rely on an ERD (Entity Relational Diagram) to understand the relational model. The following steps will aid the modeler in reading the ERD:
- Choose two entities (e.g. Product Type and Product)
- Pick one of the entities that you are interested in (e.g. how does Product Type relate to Product?)
- Read the notation on the second entity (e.g. the crow's feet next to the Product entity)
There are 4 notation combinations:
- Zero to Many
- One to Many
- One and Only One
- Zero or One
The notation in this diagram is: A Product Type can have 1 to many Products. Conversely a Product can have one and only one Product Type.
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DISPLAY A LIST COLUMN AS AN ARRAY |
By Renee Poore, Consultant
This technique shows how to display a list column as an array to minimize the real estate used to report data. It gives an overall quantity sold for a retailer and reports all the product types that make up the total.
- The report uses two queries.
- The main query contains the Retailer name and Quantity
- The second query is called the repeater query. This query has the item that needs to be displayed as an array.
- The second query also has calculated columns that allow the two queries to be connected as well as conditionally attach a comma to the item which is to be displayed as an array.
- The layout of the report consists of a list and a repeater nested inside it.
The report provides efficient use of space by presenting information in a more concise way.
For detailed steps with screen shots and to download the report specification for the report described in the technique, click here |
 About Islamic Calendar......
History
- The form of the Islamic calendar, as a lunar calendar without intercalation, was laid down by the Prophet in the Qur'an (Sura IX, verse 36-37) and in his sermon at the Farewell Pilgrimage.
- This was a departure from the lunisolar calendar commonly used in the Arab world, in which months were based on first sightings of the lunar crescent, but an intercalary month was added as deemed necessary.
Caliph 'Umar I is credited with establishing the Hijra Era in A.H. 17.
- It is not known how the initial date was determined. However, calculations show that the astronomical New Moon (i.e., conjunction) occurred on +622 July 14 at 0444 UT (assuming delta-T = 1.0 hour), so that sighting of the crescent most likely occurred on the evening of July 16.
As it exists today
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Years of twelve lunar months are reckoned from the Era of the Hijra, commemorating the migration of the Prophet and his followers from Mecca to Medina. This epoch, 1 A.H. (Anno Higerae) Muharram 1, is generally taken by astronomers (Neugebauer, 1975) to be Thursday, +622 July 15 (Julian calendar). This is called the astronomical Hijra epoch. Chronological tables (e.g., Mayr and Spuler, 1961; Freeman-Grenville, 1963) generally use Friday, July 16, which is designated the civil epoch. In both cases the Islamic day begins at sunset of the previous day.
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For religious purposes, each month begins in principle with the first sighting of the lunar crescent after the New Moon. This is particularly important for establishing the beginning and end of Ramadan. Because of uncertainties due to weather, however, a new month may be declared thirty days after the beginning of the preceding month. Although various predictive procedures have been used for determining first visibility, they have always had an equivocal status. In practice, there is disagreement among countries, religious leaders, and scientists about whether to rely on observations, which are subject to error, or to use calculations, which may be based on poor models.
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Chronologists employ a thirty-year cyclic calendar in studying Islamic history. In this tabular calendar, there are eleven leap years in the thirty-year cycle. Odd-numbered months have thirty days and even-numbered months have twenty-nine days, with a thirtieth day added to the twelfth month, Dhu al-Hijjah.
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Years 2, 5, 7, 10, 13, 16, 18, 21, 24, 26, and 29 of the cycle are designated leap years. This type of calendar is also used as a civil calendar in some Muslim countries, though other years are sometimes used as leap years. The mean length of the month of the thirty-year tabular calendar is about 2.9 seconds less than the synodic period of the Moon.
Months of the Islamic Calendar
- 1. Muharram** 30
- 2. Safar 29
- 3. Rabi'a I 30
- 4. Rabi'a II 29
- 5. Jumada I 30
- 6. Jumada II 29
- 7. Rajab** 30
- 8. Sha'ban 29
- 9. Ramadan*** 30
- 10. Shawwal 29
- 11. Dhu al-Q'adah** 30
- 12. Dhu al-Hijjah** 29*
* In a leap year, Dhu al-Hijjah has 30 days.
** Holy months.
*** Month of fasting.
Next Month....The Indian Calendar..... |
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