Do you know what is available in the content store of Cognos Analytics? When planning to upgrade your Cognos Analytics, you should check whether your content store is performing well or not. The content store holds a massive amount of important information regarding Cognos report specifications, packages, report outputs, scheduling, data source connections, etc. Through your Cognos Training, you will discover how to clean the Cognos Content Store is like a garage that continually receives increasing amounts of items that eventually need clearing out.
Reason for Content Store Bloat
One of the biggest reasons for the overstuffing of the content store is the bloating of custom folders accessed by end-users. Self-service was a hallucination from a few years back, and maximum end users didn’t produce their content, but only ran specific reports. Today, IBM Cognos has become more advanced and user-friendly. However, the end-users continue to fail to utilize it thoroughly and create multiple versions of their content, which results in content store bloat. So, if the size of the Cognos Analytics content store increases, its performance will also slow down and create unsteadiness.
Cognos enables full control of users over their content in a personal and public environment. If content retention rules are not followed, there is a huge possibility that content will stay unused and start collecting in the Content Store. With time, this content will get congested and become unorganized to preserve a managed environment.
Here are the few side effects of the overflowed content store:
- Slow performance
- Degradation
- Locking of the Content Store
- Corrupt files, etc.
Clean Your Cognos Analytics Content Store
All Cognos admins should follow these few steps to avoid performance issues in Cognos Analytics Content Store:
- Turn on Cognos Analytics Auditing which will help you to know what data is in use constantly and what is not used for a long time.
- Identify orphaned content with thorough and routine checking of your website. This type of content stays in the system when a system user with a particular folder leaves the company. Then the user is eliminated from the security, but the existing content remains there and gets orphaned. So, for handling such concerns, either delete the content or transfer the data to another user.
- For the various version created, produce definite guidelines. The results of any saved reports always remain in the database, so it is advised to keep minimum copies. You can ensure this by adjusting the report output version’s setting in its properties.
- To boost up the performance and trim down the size of the content store, IBM Cognos Content Archival enables you to save archived data in external storage.
- Cognos Admins get a Content Removal option to delete output versions in the Public Folder or Custom Folders.
Summing Up
Cognos Analytics has now come up with an automatic Content Store Cleanup Solution. Therefore, by using this solution, you can identify large and outdated content through various aspects, such as by pre-defined size, data that has not used for days or months, data that does not have any user, etc. So, if you require a smooth upgrade to the latest version of Cognos Analytics, shift to Cloud or following these best practices specified above. Cleaning the Content Store is a routine task that you must execute on time to avoid performance issues.
Join our Cognos Training to learn more tips and tricks about keeping your content store clean and handy features in the latest upgrades of Cognos Analytics.
For more information about ExistBI’s IBM Cognos Training and Consulting Services, call your nearest office: US/Canada: +020 8610 1823 | UK/Europe: +44 (0)207 554 8568 or complete ExistBI’s contact form.
