Introduction to Cognos Interview Questions and Answers
IBM Cognos is a business intelligence tool that develops business intelligence and performance management software products. IBM Cognos is generally enterprise software for a flexible reporting environment. It is a web-based reporting and analytical tool that provides interactive business solutions.
If you are preparing for a Cognos job interview, you must know the most common 2023 Cognos interview questions and answers. So continue reading to learn how to crack the interview easily.
Below is the list of top Cognos interview questions and answers.
Most Asked Cognos Interview Questions and Answers
1. What are the features of the Cognos tool?
Answer:
The Cognos tool’s features are Templates and Style References, Tabbed Report Output, Dynamic Cubes Hardware Sizing Wizard, Active Report Live Preview, My Data Sets, Extensible Visualization Enhancements, Cube Designer Enhancements, In Memory Aggregates. The Datasets features enable users to directly export the data into different formats. Further, the data is visualize to view the data as required to study or to analyze it.
The Cognos tool provides numerous extensible visual improvements. Cube Designer also contains several enhancements and new features that can import the Framework Manager Metadata information. The information of the framework model metadata is directly imported into the Cube Designer mode.
2. What is a Report Item in Cognos?
Answer:
Reporting is the most important feature of Cognos in the performance management process. It provides the path and ways for challenging business intelligence solutions. The IBM Cognos Business Intelligence version’s business intelligence solutions provide the reporting feature using the Tivoli Common Reporting feature. The report items in Cognos are the items added to the report from the package. A report item appears as a column in the list of reports and rows and columns in the crosstab reports section.
The Cognos reports contains the statuses and trending data reports about the Tivoli Storage Manager Server and its clients. The different reporting types include Cognos status and trend reports, Opening the Cognos Report Studio portal, Creating a custom Cognos report, Running a Cognos report, Scheduling and emailing a Cognos report, and Sharing Cognos reports. Custom Cognos reports can be created by inserting the items from the data source into an empty report. Any existing Cognos report can be opened and modified or used as the base for a new customized report.
3. What are the uses of gateways in Cognos?
Answer:
The web communication in the IBM Cognos server usually happens through gateways. The Cognos provides different web gateways such as CGI, ISAPI, Servlet, and Apache mod. The primary gateway is Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and in the Windows environment, the use of Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) is common. Servlet is the best gateway for the application servers those support servlets. The gateway supported by Apache servers like Tomcat is Apache mod. The IBM Cognos BI Server manages the gateway components.
When the IBM Cognos BI gateway server receives a request, it encrypts the passwords always to ensure security. It also extracts the information required to submit the requests to the IBM Cognos BI server. It also attaches the environment variables into the Web server. Also, it adds a default namespace to the request to ensure that the server always authenticates the current user in the correct namespace directory.
4. What is a Query Studio in Cognos?
Answer:
A Query Studio is a reporting tool in Cognos to create simple queries and reports in the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence server. In Query Studio, we can view data, create reports, change reports’ appearance, and work with report data. The data can be accessible by connecting to a data source and viewing the data in a hierarchical tree by expanding the query subjects to check the query item’s details. The reports created using the data source can be saved and reused. A new report from the existing report is generated from making the required changes and saving it with a different name.
The appearance of the reports can be changed by improving the layout of the reports. For example, a chart can be created by adding a title, specifying text and border styles, or reordering the columns to compare data easily. The data in a report is changed with the help of filters, summaries, and calculations by comparing and analyzing the data and drilling up and drilling down the data to view the related information. To use the Query Studio in Cognos effectively, one should be familiar with the organization’s business operations, procedures, and data. One may also need to be familiar with the other components and architecture of the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence.
5. What are the advantages of the Cognos tool?
Answer:
The advantages of IBM Cognos tools are that they reduce maintenance costs due to complete report coverage and less environmental footprint. The results are fast and short reports due to its integration and adaptive authoring. Familiar business terms cause this to be more adaptive to work. Able to use different types of data representation such as a bar or 3D bar, pie or doughnut, crosstabs, gauge, line, scatter, funnel, waterfall, and dot density features. The creation of Complex and multiple pages is possible using numerous data sources.
All sources have high-performance data access irrespective of environments, like providing high-performance data accessibility and open architecture standards support such as SOAP, WSDL, and XML. Excel, XML, PDF, CSV, and HTML are some of the multiple export formats. Other Seamless integration facility provides automatic delivery reports for the users’ working languages. Also, the features include deploying applications, designing reports, and doing comparative analysis. The transformation of business models into a reactive model is possible by identifying the potential risks and outcomes by making a thorough analysis using predictive tools.
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This has been a comprehensive guide to the Cognos Interview Questions and Answers. Here we have listed the best 5 interview sets of questions so that the jobseeker can crack the interview with ease. You may also look at the following articles to learn more –
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