I am a support technician for my company that uses an Oracle RAC database to support a few web applications, including Cognos. I have no experience with Cognos and cannot access Cognos but I've watched quite a few videos on youtube and I think I get the basics as far as what Cognos is. That said, for work I am supposed to create a maintenance plan for when the database goes down (pretty frequently, unfortunately). For instance, when the database goes down unexpectedly, there is a checklist that we've put in place on the database side to ensure that whatever tasks were processing during the failure can be reprocessed, the file system still has all required permissions, etc... We have a few things in place for our web server and application server; however, I'm at a loss of what to check in Cognos. I'd like to know the following:
-Can Cognos start and be accessed if the Oracle database is down?
-If Cognos can run while Oracle is down, I'm assuming that any automated reports that should have ran during the database's downtime would not run successfully. Is this the case? If so, is there a particular error code that will be displayed in the run log for those reports?
-If the database goes down unexpectedly, is it necessary or is it even good practice to restart Cognos once the database goes up?
I tried searching the Cognos community website; however, picking through the documentation has been fruitless so far. Any and all insight into these questions as well as any other recommendations for maintaining everything in the case of an outage would be greatly appreciated!
Cognos BI (aka Cognos Analytics) is an application like any else and it requires a database to operate. If the application database goes down (or if a reporting database goes down), then the HA/DR setup of the database will need to take over. If Cognos is to go down due to an application database outage, then there are a number of ways the system can come back online and are too numerous to describe in detail in a forum post and I suggest you contact IBM Support.