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Play around with Map control in Cognos Analytics

There’s been quite a bit of talk recently on the web about the new partnership with MapBox to deliver new map capabilities to Cognos Analytics (and there isn’t much talk about the discontinuation of support for ArcGIS in this new version). I decided to spend a bit more time to learn about the map functionality in this new Cognos version. The best way to get to know something is by doing it. So I cooked up some “real” requirements and tried to build a few dashboards.

The first one, I like to see whether a change in average temperature will affect the number of calls to fix break/leak issues related to water supply piping system, and whether a change in average rainfall will affect number of calls related to sewage/drainage systems. The data should be broken down to suburb and post-code level. Below is what I got:

For the second one, I like to compare the average planned vs actual labour hours spent on maintenance work, and the amount of time field workers spent to get to work location vs the amount of time spent on doing actual maintenance work. The purpose is to see whether there is a difference in remote areas and if it affects planned vs actual ratio. Below is what I got:

Overall, I am impressed with the ease of use, the responsiveness, and the level of interactivity of this new Map control in Dashboard. However, through this exercise, I found there are quite a number of limitations to this new map control:

  • This map control is only available in Dashboard. With Report, and Active Report, a different version of Mapbox control, and older map controls are available. However, they are both a lot less interactive and much more limited in functionality.
  • It only supports X/Y coordinates, thus, if your data is easting/northing, it needs to be converted to X/Y coordinates first.
  • For high-lighting map regions, Australian Postcode is supported and is the lowest level of detail. High-lighting suburbs is not supported, the lowest level of detail is council/city regions and the region names must match with the Mapbox pre-defined list. Thus, some level of data cleansing must be done if the region names in your data doesn’t match exactly with the city/region name in this list.
  • It is possible to upload custom maps to MapBox to achieve more refined areas, however, there was an issue with MapBox changing the way to manage Layout ID. The issue is only corrected with newer versions of Cognos (from 11.1.x). Thus, this custom map function doesn’t work with older versions (including v11.0.11 which is bundled with Maximo)

Framework Manager crashes when creating Project

I tried to create a new Framework Manager project to build a package which I will join some big Maximo tables (Assets, Workorder etc.) with some general geo/demographical data I pulled from the Web. Framework Manager kept crashing with this annoying error. After some quick search on the web, I realized the issue with FM crashing is not uncommon, and there can be a thousand reasons for that. To be honest, from the perspective of a software developer, most of these are simple and stupid exceptions which should be caught or fixed easily by the Cognos R&D team. Good software should give the end-users useful error messages about what they did wrong. But anyway, this is not another post to complain, just a quick note on another crash scenario so you can avoid:


Problem: when trying to create a new project and include the tables/object to import, Framework Manager took 10-15 minutes to process, then crashed:

Cause: In this case, because the GEO database I created only contains a few simple tables, I assumed I could just tick on it to import all tables in the database. What I did wrong was, I should only pick the tables I created. By ticking on the database entry, FM will try to import every system object included in the database (functions, sys tables, users, etc.) and it caused trouble.

 

Solution: Should always select only the tables we want to use:

Enable sysadmin and demo users to access Oracle e-business Suite 12.2.6 VM

As my teams have to involve in some Maximo – Oracle EBS integration projects, I decided to download the latest Oracle EBS demo VM to learn a bit more about the system. Downloading and deploying the environment from edelivery.oracle.com is straight forward.

The good thing about Oracle EBS 12.2.5 or later is that Oracle team decided to install everything in 
only one VM box. As such, the download file size is very small, only 60GB. And after deployment, the VM only takes 300GB (much smaller compared to 700-800GB in previous version). The VM only requires 8GB RAM, thus, it fits very well into my laptop with 16GB RAM and 1TB HDD. I still can run one Maximo environment to try out some integration code if necessary.

One difficulty I got after deploying EBS is I couldn’t login using the standard SYSADMIN/welcome username and password. EBS kept returning a “failed to login” error message. After some investigation, I found out that I have to go into /u01/install/APPS/scripts and run the enableDEMOusers.sh and enableSYSADMIN.sh scripts in order to login.
Will post updates of my progresses learning about EBS and integration in the future.

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