Book excerpt: Maximize the Value of Business Intelligence with IBM Cognos v10 -- Hands-on, from Start to Finish This easy-to-use, hands-on guide brings together all the information and insight you need to drive maximum business value from IBM Cognos v10. Long-time IBM Cognos expert and product designer Sangeeta Gautam thoroughly illuminates Cognos BI v10's key capabilities: analysis, query, reporting, and dashboards. Gautam shows how to take full advantage of each key IBM Cognos feature, including brand-new innovations such as Active Reports and the new IBM Cognos Workspace report consumption environment. She concludes by walking you through successfully planning and implementing an integrated business intelligence solution using IBM's best-practice methodologies. The first and only guide of its kind, IBM Cognos Business Intelligence v10 offers expert insights for BI designers, architects, developers, administrators, project managers, nontechnical end-users, and partners throughout all areas of the business--from sales and marketing to operations and lines of business. If you're pursuing official IBM Cognos certification, you'll also find Cognos certification sample questions and information to help you with the certification process. Coverage Includes * Understanding IBM Cognos BI's components and open, extensible architecture * Working with IBM Cognos key "studio" tools: Analysis Studio, Query Studio, Report Studio, and Event Studio * Developing and managing powerful reports that draw on the rich capabilities of IBM Cognos Workspace and Workspace Advanced * Designing Star Schema databases and metadata models to answer the questions your organization cares about most * Efficiently maintaining and systematically securing IBM Cognos BI environments and their objects * Using IBM Cognos Connection as your single point of entry to all corporate data * Building interactive, easy-to-manage Active Reports for casual business users * Using new IBM Cognos BI v10.1 Dynamic Query Mode (DQM) to improve performance with complex heterogeneous data * Identifying, exploring, and exploiting hidden data relationships * Creating quick ad hoc queries that deliver fast answers * Establishing user and administrator roles