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.

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CanyonMan said...
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