Cognos 8 provides support for accessing secured Cognos cubes as data sources. These cubes include PowerCubes generated by Transformer 7.3 and later, Cognos Finance multi-dimensional cubes, and Cognos Planning - Contributor cubes. To access a Cognos cube that is secured to a Series 7 namespace, you must first log into the Series 7 namespace.
Transformer 8.3 supports Cognos 8 security, including the Series 7 namespace. You can also transition custom views to the Cognos 8 namespace. When you connect to a Cognos cube that is secured with Cognos 8 security, you must be logged into the namespace the cube was designed with before accessing the cube.
For information about integrating Cognos Finance multi-dimensional cubes in your Cognos 8 environment, see the Cognos Finance User Guide. For information about connecting to the Cognos Planning - Contributor unpublished (real-time) data, see the Cognos Planning Installation Guide.
Cognos supports the deployment of Cognos 8.3 PowerCubes in production environments that are secured against a single namespace. PowerCubes that are secured against multiple namespaces are not supported in production environments. For this reason, when you deploy cubes for use in production, ensure that they are secured against one namespace. To do this, select the option Restrict PowerCube authentication to a single namespace in the Signon properties. For more information, see the Transformer User Guide.
For PowerCubes, the connection information in Cognos Connection provides both a Windows and UNIX path to a cube file. If all of your report servers are installed on Windows computers, you need only use the Windows path in Cognos Connection. Similarly, if all of your report servers are installed on UNIX computers, then you need only use the UNIX path in Cognos Connection.
Note: If you are using Framework Manager, the Windows path to the PowerCube is required.
If you have report servers installed on both Windows and UNIX computers and you want the report server running the request to have access to the PowerCube in both environments, you can use both the Windows and UNIX paths in Cognos Connection. To ensure that the same data is returned regardless of the environment in which the report server accesses the cube, the same cube file must be saved in the locations specified by the Windows and UNIX paths in Cognos Connection.
PowerCubes can only be created in the Linux environment if you are using Transformer 8.3 and a Cognos 8 security provider. However, you can deploy secured Series 7 PowerCubes to Linux computers running as report servers in the Cognos 8 environment. The Content Manager computer must be running on a Series 7-compliant platform.
If you are testing the migration of your Series 7 PowerCubes to Cognos 8, you can select the authenticate with All applicable namespaces method.
If a PowerCube that you have already created a connection for has to be updated, you can update the connection in Cognos 8 without affecting users who may be currently accessing the original PowerCube.
When you use Series 7 PowerCubes as data sources, we recommend that you optimize them for Cognos 8. Optimized PowerCubes provide faster data retrieval at runtime. You optimize PowerCubes using a command line utility named pcoptimizer, which is supplied with Cognos 8. For more information about optimizing PowerCubes, see the Troubleshooting section in this guide.
If a cube contains security views and you are logged on as Anonymous, you will receive an error message. This is because Cognos 8 cannot validate the user "Anonymous" against the Cognos 8 namespace user credentials. To avoid this situation, log on to the Cognos 8 namespace with a user ID and password, and then publish the cube.