Using IBM Cognos Insight 10.2 Personal Edition to create my Dashboard CV

IBM Cognos Insight 10.2 Personal Edition is a very impressive addition to the IBM Cognos BI suite. You can instantly make interactive Dashboards by pulling data from a file or a database connection. Inspired by Dmitry Gudkov (http://bi-review.blogspot.com) and to try out IBM Cognos Insight, I decided to make a Dashboard out of my CV. 

Result...not bad. A nice Dashboard with Pie & Donut charts, bar charts, Tree map, Images, etc.

Now I have downloaded QlikView and Tableau as well and I plan to learn and make my CV on these platforms as well.

Stay tuned :)

All scheduled reports going to pending state

Pending, Pending, Pending

Issue: While I was away for vacation, there was a problem in our IBM Cognos 8.1.2 Content Store DB and so the D/W administrator had to bounce it. Due to some reason, all the scheduled reports stopped working and were going to pending state. In fact, we could not even run the reports in the background with "Save As" option. The reports were running fine manually. I found a couple of solutions to this problem as follows:

1. Renew the credentials for the user who owns the schedules (Thats simple..)
2. Restart Cognos Services (Wow!)
3. Increase the "CONTENT_STORE"."NC_TASK_QUEUE"."SCHEDULE_TYPE"                     from 6 to 15  (:|) 
4. Change the SYN attack protection to "disabled" (:}) 
5. Run the NC_DROP script. (hmmm..)

Cause: Possibly some corrupt tables in the CS related to Scheduling...or maybe......

Well, after trying option 1 & 2,  I was left with no choice but to opt for option 5. Most of the forums discussed about option 5 and how it was the most obvious path to follow. Even though some warned that this is not the permanent solution and the issue might come back :[ 

IBM also recommends this at http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21371279

Result: Smooth script run, smooth start of cognos services and.........the schedules have all started working :)

Hurray!

Well, I would definately appreciate other cognosers out there to give their opinion on this, after all I am just a cogmesser who started in the desert ;) 

Note: "If dropping the NC* tables does not resolve the issue then restore the content store from the latest backup version." -  IBM Technote