Cognos Analytics 11.0.6 introduces support for Google BigQuery and Google Cloud SQL via the BigQuery JDBC and MySQL JDBC drivers, respectively.

The Google Data Transfer service can be used to feed BigQuery with data from Google Adwords, Google Analytics, and other such offerings. Of special note is the ability to access certain public data sets – check out this video on how to do it for free.

JDBC URL entry for Data Server Connections

Data server connections under the Manage area of Cognos Analytics now offer an entry to paste in a JDBC URL. In prior releases, connection information was entered through several different fields that the Cognos software would parse and collate into a JDBC URL.



When a new connection is created, an example of a JDBC URL supported by the selected data store technology is provided. The example URL is complimentary to that vendor’s documentation and database administrators should be able to provide users with a JDBC URL just as easily as they could any other information needed to connect to their servers.

The JDBC URL entry is flexible in enabling you to take advantage of all the capabilities your data store technology of choice has to offer while making it more obvious you can do so. Let me illustrate this with a few examples.

In the Microsoft SQL Server JDBC URL documentation you may notice that the only mandatory portion of the URL is jdbc:sqlserver://. So technically there needn’t be any required fields for a SQL Server database, but in a real world Cognos Analytics environment where users are connecting to a shared production database it’s safe to assume that more information needs to be supplied. In prior versions of Cognos Analytics there were entry fields for Server, Port and Database name, but there was no entry field for Instance name which isn’t necessary for all SQL Server connections but does need to be specified for the common occurrence of there being more than on instance on the server. For the many who need to enter an instance name, it’s clearer how to do so via a JDBC URL field than in the connection properties field since it aligns to your vendor’s (Microsoft in this example) documentation.

Increasingly, more organizations are mandated to use database security features that can be invoked with parameters on a JDBC URL. For example, to use Knox security for Hadoop via JDBC, you need JDBC URL like the following for a Hive data server:



Likewise, failover, load balancing, and data replication capabilities are increasingly sought after. A JDBC URL is the simplest way to configure any of these within Cognos Analytics as per the following MySQL JDBC URL examples:



Cloud data stores are also increasing in popularity and often do not have traditional parameters like port numbers in their JDBC URL. IBM Bluemix and AWS databases make the JDBC URL readily available for copy and paste into applications like Cognos Analytics.

 

Data Server Connection settings is now a tab

Connection information used to be accessible only from the context menu of a data server connection as shown in the following screenshot version 11.0.5:



In 11.0.6 this information is easier to find as tab as shown below.



Feedback information when testing a connection

When you successfully Test a connection to a data server, you can now see useful information like the server and client software versions and the time to connect (lag). Previously this information was only exposed in the Cognos Administration console.

 










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