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Cognos Concepts: Stitch Query in Cognos Reporting

Explained
by Ryan Johnson on May 17th, 2012
So what exactly does it mean when Cognos performs a stitch query? Lets start with a

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business scenario and question:

A Manager asks a Report Developer to provide a report showing a comparison between
Actual Sales and Forecast Sales for any years we have data.
But these measures come from two completely separate facts: the Forecast Fact and
Sales Fact. How would Cognos understand their relation to each other? To achieve this
Cognos uses a conformed dimension(s) (dimensions that occur in both facts) as a
common data point. Since the Manager has requested the attribute Year as the
granularity, we will use the dimension which Year is a part of: Time. The example below
shows how the Time dimension for each fact is used to bridge the two subject areas:

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Now that we have a way to relate the two facts, lets create an actual report. The Report
Developer is going to create a list report by dragging on three items:

Year | Actual Sales | Forecast Sales

Behind the scenes, Cognos will need to first perform a query for each fact separately to

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retrieve each year/measure combination:

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Cognos will then stitch the two queries together on the common Year data points with a
third stitch query, displaying this to the user:

From a technical standpoint Cognos is performing a full outer join between the queries.
This can also be done using measures from multiple facts. While seemingly simple to

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the user, behind the scenes Cognos does the heavy lifting and gets surgical with stitch
queries.
Tags: Cognos, ibm, Report Studio, Stitch Query
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2012 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Business Analytics.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave
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6 thoughts on Cognos Concepts: Stitch Query in Cognos

Reporting Explained

1.

Ramu November 8, 2014 at 11:47 pm

Excellent Explanation.
Reply

2.

vedika March 12, 2014 at 2:22 am

Hi
Its very nice explanation.Thanks for helping
Reply

3.

jilani December 28, 2012 at 12:35 pm

One ore Doubt in Stched Query it applys full outer join is it not possible to apply
left or right join in FM to that two fact tables and date dim table then wt happen
exatly explain plzz
Reply

4.

khalid Nazeer October 9, 2012 at 12:36 pm

Hi
Ryan great explanation this is the most common questions
in BI interviews, keep helping Developers
Thanks
khalid
Cognos Consultant

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Reply

1.

Ryan Johnson Post authorOctober 18, 2012 at 5:29 pm

Thanks for the comment Khalid. More Cognos Concepts to come!
Reply

1.

jilani December 28, 2012 at 12:28 pm

very good explanation with example and wt is the role actual role of

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