Søren Andersens personlige blog

Lately I have been working in a company, that is currently implementing Cognos 8.4. The Cognos project was mainly started for the purpose of better knowledge about sales and economics. I work with the production division, and have found some neat areas of use for Cognos reporting.

One of these areas is quality control, that we collect in via Redmine project management, which is based on a MySQL database. Unfortunately there is no native support for MySQL in Cognos. Therefore an ODBC connection is the best way to go. Again it turns out that there’s trouble.

Installing the MySQL ODBC connectors isn’t a problem, but it doesn’t work right out of the box if you choose the newest version. Version 3.51 works better, and is currently still available on their official website. (It is possible getting the newest drivers to work, with a bit of configuration)

But the troubles aren’t over. When trying to fetch fields of the type TEXT from the MySQL database, Cognos will throw an error about SQLBindParameters, that aren’t applied. The error log seems weird, as it doesn’t write the field name in the SELECT query, instead it writes some number that doesn’t make any sense.

Toying around with Cognos and searching A LOT on Goole, I came up with a solution on my own. By editing the Data Source Query Subject directly, I was able to put the field in question inside the CONCAT() function. Apparently this fixes the issue with SQLBindParameters and the modeling can begin.

Native support for MySQL would be great in Cognos, but it doesn’t seem like that there’s anything planned. Hopefully you will find this post useful, so you don’t end up spending as much time resolving this issue as I have

Please throw a comment if you use this solution, or know of an alternative one. Remember that this is only an issue with fields that are of the type TEXT, VARCHAR and other types designed for 1 line only, works with no issues.