Cognos Content Manager tools - An overview
For many Cognos 8 administrators, it sometimes seems that the Content Store database is growing substantially for "no good reason". Obviously there is a reason; however, it may be difficult to pinpoint the cause without the proper tool to help you. Let's use the Content Store as an example. Most of the objects saved in the Content Store database are presented in Cognos Connection. These objects are displayed nicely for end users to navigate, but there is no interface available for administrators to see an overall view of all the existing objects that could contribute to the size of the Content Store database. The frustrations from customers have inspired us to come up with the IBM Cognos 8 Content Manager Size Tool, "CMSize," a stand-alone Eclipse project that queries the Content Store database to get a summary of the number and size of various objects. The results are then displayed in a simple format. This tool also provides the option for administrators to select any area of the Content Store to query (Public Folders, for example), a specific folder, users' My folders, and types of objects to query (for example, reports, queries, jobs, deployment, and so on).
If Cognos administrators run this tool regularly and save the results to a file each time, they have the ability to compare these files to find out what has changed. This can give an idea of why the Content Store database keeps growing and the administrator can take actions based on the comparison results.
A Cognos 8 SDK developer on the other hand may be more interested in finding out properties of various objects in the Content Store. A quick browse to get property settings can help developers quickly identify what is available and what can be changed programmatically using SDK toolkit. The IBM Cognos 8 Content Manager Browser Tool ("CM Browser") reports detailed information for all objects in the Content Store database.
These tools run with product version IBM Cognos 8.3.
