IBM's Cognos provides visual information on cumulative financial performance, strategy management, and business intelligence, typically for analysis. Data transformation program Sort Control LanguageSortCLin IRI CoSort or IRI Voracity filters, sorts, joins, aggregates, segments, masks, and formats data into a subset of CSV and other common „feed“ files outside of the BI layer.

Providing data with CoSort improves Cognos performance and avoids data integrity and reconciliation issues when integrating data into the BI layer.

IBM's Cognos is a powerful platform that helps companies transform their data into valuable insights. It offers the ability to consolidate large amounts of data from various sources and present it in visually appealing ways. With Cognos, users can create detailed reports and dashboards that are crucial for understanding financial performance, strategic decision-making, and business analysis.

A key advantage of Cognos lies in its flexibility. The platform allows for reports to be customized to individual needs without reliance on technical expertise. The user interface is intuitively designed, enabling users to interactively access data. This makes it easier to sort and filter data. This makes Cognos a valuable tool for business departments that need to make quick decisions based on current information.

Furthermore, Cognos is characterized by its seamless integration into existing IT environments. It connects effortlessly with diverse data sources, ensuring that reports are always based on the latest data. This real-time transparency is crucial for identifying and responding to business trends. The ability to combine historical and current data provides companies with the necessary overview to make informed and forward-looking decisions.

For example, if a Cognos user created a report that required sort, join, and aggregation steps, the entire job took 158 seconds. The same transformations ran in SortCL in 21 seconds and the results were available to multiple applications. It took the Cognos user an additional 58 seconds to run the report with the data from SortCL. Thus, the total time to create the same report using SortCL for transformation was only 79 seconds.

More information about the benchmark and the interaction of CoSort with Cognos can be found here.