How to access Cognos PowerPlay Cubes with other applications?

Question

There are Cognos PowerPlay Cubes (Cognos v7.3) which are distributed via Email and then stored on local clients. At the moment, users use MS Access as an interface to access the data and reports in the Cubes. Is there any other tool, application or programming language which allows to access the PowerPlay Cubes and the tables/graphs within?

The requirement is to implement a user interface that is much easier to use than the old MS Access one.

To access data directly with Cognos Studios is not an option, because it is obligatory that the data must be available offline too.

Thank you for any ideas.

Best Regards.

Answer 1

As I understand it, this is not possible. About a year ago when we were evaluating products, this was a red flag on Cognos. We've migrated our cubes to SSAS that need to be available for non-Cognos use.

Answer 2

You can access Cognos PowerPlay cubes offline using the Cognos Powerplay version 7.x client, which I believe is packaged with the Transformer application that is used to create the cubes. It will most likely be better than anything you develop yourself.

To my knowledge, there is no API for accessing the data stored directly in the cubes with a programming language. At least not in 7.x.