Life Sciences

• The scheduling and execution of these upgrades will begin immediately (December 2021), with all such environments planned to be upgraded during the next few months.
• When your Cognos environment(s) are provisionally scheduled, you will be contacted by your Services Representative well in advance as to confirm the date(s) proposed.
• As this is an in-place upgrade (and not a migration) custom Cognos reports do not need to be moved.

• During a Cognos upgrade, connected InForm studies will be affected as follows:

  • The InForm reporting feature and Report Extractor (RE) will be unavailable.
  • Auto deployment should not be attempted.
  • Core InForm functionality and the Reporting Database Extract (RDE) will continue to be available.

Note: Oracle Solution Report Extractor (RE) patch 6.3.0.2 is a prerequisite to ensure compatibility with Cognos 11.1.7 FP3.

IBM does not publish cumulative changes between patches/releases. Therefore, to see detail on new/changed features in Cognos Analytics 11.1.7 FP3 as compared to the most recent version validation for InForm Reporting (11.1.7 IF1017), review the IBM documentation for the 11.1.7 Cognos patches:

• Release 11.1.7 FP2
• Release 11.1.7 FP3

Whilst the IBM Cognos functionality and user interface may change between Cognos versions, InForm reporting objects present in a Cognos environment remain unaltered by a Cognos version upgrade, inclusive of standard InForm reports and their associated folder structures.

As announced previously, as of InForm release 6.2 onwards, InForm has decoupled from IBM Cognos Analytics, enabling Oracle to continually upgrade customer Cognos environments (the tech stack of the InForm Reporting Module) without the need for an associated InForm version change. For more detail of this de-coupling, see the Cognos announcement - InForm Cognos environment upgrade from v11.0.5 to v11.1.1 (18 Oct 2019).

As announced previously, Oracle identified an un-expected change of behavior in Cognos 11.1.7 (as compared to 11.1.1). As part of the Oracle-hosted upgrades/migrations to Cognos 11.1.7 IF1017, the impact to existing applicable Reports was mitigated by executing an IBM tool.

The IBM tool will not be run as part of 11.1.7 FP3 upgrades, as all (existing) affected reports will have been corrected, however we want to remind customers that any applicable newly created/imported Reports must adhere to this new configuration requirement, as to prevent being similarly impacted. Please see MOS Note 2789186.1: How to manually set Query Hint ‘Use SQL with clause’ to ‘No’ in a SQL Report and the previous announcement for more detail on this topic.