In this article, we will continue our exploration of Reporting Options for Analysis Services Cubes. After a brief introduction to the application, we will examine some of the options offered by Cognos PowerPlay for report building with Analysis Services cubes. As we did with the MS Office reporting options in previous Reporting Options articles, we will present an introduction to using Cognos PowerPlay to retrieve and display information from our cubes.

We will discuss in order the steps needed to set the application up specifically for accessing a non-Cognos cube, then expose the steps required for the definition our data source, and for the establishment of a connection to the cube. Next, we will briefly examine the layout and navigation of the two reporting approaches that PowerPlay offers, and examine illustrations of browsing and reporting our cube data from each.

In exploring the use of Cognos PowerPlay with Analysis Services cubes, we will be considering two primary approaches. In this article, we will examine using Cognos PowerPlay to report from the client platform, as well as over the web. As the two approaches share several preparatory steps, we will perform the common setup procedures, and then we will expose the specific setup of each.
As virtually anyone using PowerPlay is aware, in a "typical" implementation, the application forms the reporting component of an end-to-end OLAP solution, whose proprietary OLAP data sources, "PowerCubes," are created via another component called Transformer. Cognos began in recent versions to make PowerPlay work with other OLAP servers, including MSSQL Server Analysis Services ("Analysis Services"). The motivation is obvious, as the ascendancy of the RDBMS-generated cube is, at this stage, both inevitable and irresistible.

The topics within this article will include:

• An introduction to the features that are available within Cognos PowerPlay EP Series 7.0 and later, and options that provide for creating robust and flexible reports;
• Setup of the Cognos PowerPlay components to provide two distinct reporting options, PowerPlay Web and PowerPlay Client (AKA User Edition Windows) reporting;
• The establishment of connectivity and other preparatory steps to enable reporting via the two options;
• The basics of use and navigation of the PowerPlay Client (aka User Edition Windows) and PowerPlay Web components in reporting from Analysis Services OLAP cubes.

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About the Series:

This article is a member of the series Introduction to MSSQL Server 2000 Analysis Services. The series is designed to provide hands-on application of the fundamentals of MS SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services, with each installment progressively adding features and techniques designed to meet specific real - world needs. For more information on the series, as well as the hardware / software requirements to prepare for the exercises we will undertake, please see my initial article, Creating Our First Cube.

Cognos, Analysis Services, conversion, PowerPlay, Reporting Options, PowerPlay Web , PowerPlay Client, PowerCube, Data Connection, OLAP, Client, Business Intelligence, Query, Navigation, Member, Drill down, Format

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