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IBM Business Analytics Diagnostics: Use Case: Data Retrieval

Product(s): IBM Cognos BI; Area of Interest: Infrastructure

Cognos Proven Practices Team, Cognos Proven Practices Team, IBM

Cognos Proven Practices Team

Summary: This document describe troubleshooting method of an issue connecting to Teradata.

View more content in this series

Date: 28 Mar 2012
Level: Introductory
PDF: A4 and Letter (101 KB | 3 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®
Also available in: Russian

Activity: 10901 views
Comments:

Introduction

Purpose

This document is intended to provide a troubleshooting methodology which incorporates publicly available utilities to diagnose and resolve an issue identified within a specific use case. The use case will be presented as a scenario where an IBM Cognos Support Analyst is working with a client to diagnose and solve a particular issue.

The utilities mentioned in this document can be found at http://www.ibm.com/software/analytics/support/cognos_sdk.html.

Applicability

Although the troubleshooting approach outlined is not IBM Cognos BI version specific, some of the diagnostic utilities used are. The version of the utility to be downloaded will be specific to the IBM Cognos BI version that is experiencing the issue.

Use Case Description

An administrator has two AIX environments, Development and Production, each running IBM Cognos BI version 8.4.1 and accessing a Teradata database for report data. On the Development environment all is working well but on the Production environment the administrator gets the following error when running a report.

RQP-DEF-0068 Unable to connect to at least one database during a multi-database attach to 1 database(s) in: testDataSourceConnection

Troubleshooting the Use Case

Each environment consists of a single server install with the following details:

IBM Cognos BI version: 8.4.1
Operating System: IBM AIX 6.1
Query Database: Teradata

Both environments are configured to hit the same Teradata data source that is located on another server. The administrator has also confirmed that the same version of the Teradata ODBC driver has been installed on both AIX machines.

Error Message information gathering

In order to find information about this error and other potential messages in the cogserver.log file, the administrator downloads the IBM Cognos From Log Errors to Technotes Utility located at the following URL,
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24028415.

This utility will gather all the errors in the cogserver.log file and will quickly get information about an error by linking you to associated IBM Technotes.

The administrator finds out that the error he has might be caused as a result of the LIBPATH environment variable not pointing to the Teradata ODBC driver.

Comparing the differences between the 2 environments

The administrator decides to compare the differences between the two environments. In order to do this, the administrator uses the System Overview Diagnostic located at http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24020682.

This utility gathers configuration settings, operating system versions and environment variables.

The administrator runs the utility on both environments. Once complete, the administrator then compares the log files from both environments. What the administrator finds out is that the LIBPATH environment variable for the Production environment did not contain the correct path to the Teradata ODBC driver.

Conclusion

The administrator then corrects the LIBPATH environment variable, restarts IBM Cognos 8.4.1 and retests. This time, the reports work without errors in both environments.

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