Sources of data
To create and run reports, dashboards, stories, or explorations you need data. This data might be made available to you by an administrator who creates packages or data modules, or you could upload your own data files.
You can use data modules, packages, data sets, and uploaded files as sources of data for your IBM Cognos applications.
When data modules and models are built, and queries are planned and executed, the data source is required to describe the column data type to the query service. The query service maps the source column data types to the types it supports. If the source data type is not supported by the query service, the query service treats it as an unknown type. For more information, see Supported SQL data types.