Cognos Analysis Studio is Cognos' web-based tool for multidimensional data analysis and exploration. We can drag-and-drop through, analyze, and compare dimensional data in an interactive environment to find answers to business questions. For example, the sales situation can be analyzed from the product attributes and sales attributes. By analyzing the sales situation in a certain period of time, the factors that affect the sales can be learned, so that targeted sales strategies, policies and resource adjustments can be made. This article describes how to use Analysis Studio to perform multidimensional analysis of data.
Before learning Analysis Studio, we need to understand some basic concepts.
Dimension - is a business-related perspective. A collection of attributes constitutes a dimension, such as a time dimension, a geographic dimension, and so on.
Multidimensional Cube - All dimensions together provide a multidimensional view of the business. The data for this multidimensional view is stored as a cube.
Layers - There are several layers under a dimension. For example, there are four levels of region, country, office, and salesperson under the region dimension. There are three layers of year, quarter, and month under the time dimension.
Category - is the specific value of the data in each layer of each dimension. The lower-level class has a parent-child relationship with a certain upper-level class. Categories appear on row and column headers in Analysis Studio reports.
The following diagram illustrates the relationship of dimensions, layers, and categories:
Metrics - Numerical data used to evaluate business conditions. For example: sales, cost, high number of sales, profit, cost, inventory, etc. Different metrics reflect different business properties. The metrics are independent of each other.
In Cognos Analytics 11 , Analysis Studio opens differently than in previous versions. In version 11, we can click "New" -> "Other" in the navigation bar on the left side of the main page, and then select "Analysis Studio" from the pop-up "Partner Application" menu bar.
After that, a "Select Data Package (Browse)" page will pop up, click the desired data package in this page. In the New dialog box, select Yes to use blank analysis.
This is the interface of Analysis Studio. Divided into "Menu and Toolbar", "Insertable Object Pane", "Member Item Information", "Overview Area", "Work Area" and "Properties Window".
The Insertable Objects Pane contains the data source structure of the model package. The user drags the required object from the data source structure of the model package in the "Insertable Object Pane" to the corresponding position in the "Workspace": put the measurement value in the position of the Measure, and can also put multiple measurement values. For display or comparison; put dimension values in the Row and Column in the "Overview Area", or in the Row and Column in the "Workspace" to achieve the same effect; if you put dimension members in the "Overview area" ” in the Context space, you can focus the data on this dimension member. In the "Workspace" window, you can know the data sources filtered in the current work block through the values in Row and Column. In this block, you can also change the content of rows and columns, or drill up and down data. At the same time, you can See Filtering and Sorting Settings. The "Member Information" column can view member item information, and the Information information window displays the data of the member item selected in the data tab, such as name, type, level, attribute, and aggregation relationship.
The following figure is a basic layout with one dimension for each row and column, "Product" as the row, "Retailer" as the column, the measure value is "Revenue", and "Sales Time" as the filter condition.
Drilling down from the product dimension layer by layer, you can see the detailed data of type -> brand -> model.
If you drill down from the seller dimension, you can see the detailed data of country->agent->city.
We also often use the concept of "rotation" in multidimensional analysis. Think of data as a cube, the so-called "rotation" is to change the angle of viewing the business. In Analysis Studio we can change the content of rows or columns to other dimensions to achieve rotation. After the rotation, the "product" in the product dimension is replaced by the time dimension. Although the "product" no longer appears in the ranks, its positioning in the multi-dimensional structure has not changed, so the "product" is marked in the "Context" area. , which filters the analysis report.
For a better view of the data, you can also sort by measure, sort by title, add charts, and more. The available chart types include pie chart, column chart, bar chart, area chart, line chart, scatter chart, combination chart, radar chart, etc. You can also drill up and down on the chart.
In the above, we only use one dimension in each of the rows and columns of the report. In actual use, we often use expressions such as combined dimensions, nested dimensions, and unbalanced nesting. If you want to know more Analysis Studio usage skills, please click the "link below" for more information.