Switch to TM1's Native MDX Engine to improve performance in Cognos BI

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If you are using Cognos Business Intelligence 10.2.2 or higher along with TM1 10.2.1 FP3 and higher, then you can improve performance in some reports by removing a layer of processing in the Bluenose MDX engine such that the BI server calls upon TM1's Native MDX engine directly.

The Bluenose MDX engine is based on the MDX engine of BI v8 and was first introduced into TM1 v8 to handle the more complex MDX requests required by many BI reports.

There is no longer a need to use Bluenose for the complex MDX queries since the MDX engine in BI (a.k.a. LOLAP) resolves those, and TM1's native MDX engine is better at the simpler queries, therefore performance can improved by avoiding the overhead of having to go through Bluenose.

In Cognos BI 10.2.2, by default the Bluenose MDX Engine is still always used and will delegate certain requests to the Native MDX Engine. The reason for this default is to avoid the risk of undesired changes to saved BI content that might occur in switching MDX engines. Most reports won't require any changes but some might. The most likely cause of seeing different results in a report after bypassing the Bluenose MDX engine is caused by under fed cubes - please see http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/financial_management/analytics/page620.html for more information on under fed cubes.

To bypass the Bluenose MDX Engine, set an advanced setting on the BI query service called qsUseNativeTM1Engine and set it to true as demonstrated in the following screenshot: