IBM Cognos Dynamic Cubes

Chapter 1. Overview of Cognos Dynamic Cubes 3

Figure 1-1 on page 3 shows how Cognos Dynamic Cubes is tightly integrated into the Cognos

BI stack, and its data can be surfaced through any of the Cognos interfaces. This way allows

existing customers to integrate this technology into their application environment without

affecting existing users, who are already familiar with interfaces such as Report Studio,

Business Workspace, and Business Workspace Advanced (previously named Business

Insight and Business Insight Advanced).

Figure 1-1 Cognos Dynamic Cubes integrated into the Cognos BI stack

1.1.1 High performance interactive analysis

Cognos Dynamic Cubes is a technology meant to solve a specific but growing business

problem: enabling high-performance interactive analysis over terabytes of data contained in

an enterprise data warehouse (EDW).

As data volumes grow, analyzing that data with speed-of-thought performance can be

challenging. Even with modern data warehouse technology, some operations require

significant computation or data movement. This computation or movement creates delays and

reduces the satisfaction of business users who want to perform these analyses.

Various ways exist to accomplish performance over large volumes of data. From

self-contained cubes to large in-memory appliances, different vendors are employing

variations of similar methodologies to give business users timely response times.

The Cognos Dynamic Cubes technology aims to give maximum flexibility in how memory is

leveraged to accelerate interactive analysis over terabytes of data, giving you the ability to

evolve your deployments over time.