Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Query Studio 8.4

The often overlooked Query Studio has been a simple little query tool that hasn't seen much visible change in the last few years. While new studios for Query continue to pop-up (Express Author, PowerPlay Studio, CAFE), Query Studio chugs along as a handy product to quickly build lists and crosstabs. Cognos developers have always replied on Query Studio as a way to verify Framework Manager models -- it's fast and reliable, and seeing the data immediately rather than having to execute is great.

As with every Cognos 8 release, there's not much new to report with Query Studio. Still, a few nuggets have come out of 8.4:

  • Filter Usability: Query Studio users rejoice! You can now type in values when filtering a dimension. This means you can easily copy and paste from a list you may keep handy in Excel or a note. This long awaited feature has arrived. And there's more -- you can also now add a filter without adding a column to the query -- just right click on the data item.
  • Lineage: Lineage is a new feature in all 8.4 Studios that traces the metadata through the package and datasources. It's really handy when testing a multi-layered model, and is a great advancement in Cognos 8.4. It's there, as you would expect, in Query Studio 8.4.
  • Performance: Like all studios, performance has been improved each release. 8.4 is really snappy on my demo data sets, both relational and dimensional.

1 comments:

Chris A Tyler said...

The custom grouping feature is great for people who want to group data using groups that they want to use. For example, if the data has groups for states, and I want to group those states into regions that make sense to me, such as East, West, North and South, and this grouping has not been created, I can do that with Custom Grouping.

Expanding on the filtering idea, the ability now to create complex filters with and/or combinations is extremely powerful.

Conditional highlighting allows me to call out anomalies in my data.

Finally, the ability to apply a corporate template makes my Ad Hoc report look very professional.