We are looking at PowerPlay and Impromptu from Cognos, and at Business Objects, and have some questions on scalability. Has anyone run into issues with this? How “big” can these products scale? Any information in terms of data size, number of dimensions, depths of dimensions, rows in the fact table, width of the fact table, etc would be very helpful.
Thanks!
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
Hi Kieth,
The short answer is that BusinessObjects will scale much better than Impromptu/Powerplay. The simple explanation for this is:
BusinessObjects Universes are a “metadata” representation of your warehouse or database that allows users to ask any question. You do not need to store pre defined cubes for users to query, their cubes are built as they query. As far as I know, from my five years experience with BusinessObjects, there are no restrictions on fact table size. You also will not suffer any restrictions on scalability in relation to deployment and security with BusinessObjects. They have a number of customer sites running 10,000 users. There is a lot more detail to go into regarding scalability that you will be better off asking your BusinessObjects rep about.
Impromptu/Powerplay is less scalable due to the fact that all Powerplay cubes must be pre-built by an IT person for end users to query. This means that you are storing the cubes of data as well as storing the warehouse or database. It also means that if a powerplay cube has been built without including information that a user wants, the IT person then has to rebuild the cube (no user autonomy) which I believe takes an overnight build. I do not know too much about the scalability of number of users/security. You would have to ask the rep about that.
Hope that gives you some things to think about.
Kind Regards,
Felicity Pietersz
e-BI Solutions
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Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
Can someone who has worked with Cognos recently help to confirm the assertions made above. In discussions with users who work with Cognos, its ‘cubes’ is being touted as a major advantage over BusinessObjects. Can anyone comment on the differences between a Cognos ‘cube’ and a BusinessObjects ‘cube’. I would truly appreciate it!
Cindy Clayton 
(BOB member since 2002-06-11)
Can’t comment on the stuff above exactly, but the premise will be something like The cube is pre-built so queries on it will be much faster than a BO refresh to build the cube on demand each time you want to change something (Except if you want to add something that isn’t in the cube will probably be glossed over!)
ken.gaul 
(BOB member since 2002-06-18)
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just want to add this tidbit… here we run both cognos / bo… our cognos cube builds are basically going on all the time, and the individual builds may run from 30 mintes to 3 hours, depending on the complexity and the size of the cube built.
Also, I think it’s not quite fair to say that cubes aren’t flexible - you could say the same about BO in the proper context: if you can’t currently run a report, you have to update the universe - requires a developer to step in. That’s as inflexible as having to update a cube model, no?
All comes down to what you want to do and what process / tools / people you have in place to do it.
Brent
bdouglas 
(BOB member since 2002-08-29)