So it seems like I have been away for a long time. In my defense, I was busy. I got married and have been navigating the joys (and perils!!) of married life!!
The perils usually came when I had to work late on getting Cognos environments up for our customers and my stubborn wife insisted on staying up and keeping me company (shooting daggers at me all the time, mind it) while I was up troubleshooting issues with IBM ;-)
One such situation was when I had to work with IBM support on getting an environment up that refused to come up, no matter what we tried to do. The content store was on a Microsoft SQL Server environment and the startup process would complete successfully. The only exception was that the dispatcher would not complete initialization successfully.
The environment was a default install with all components installed and configured with the default settings. The dispatcher, gateway and content manager were set with the default settings. There was no configuration that was edited or customized.
All startup tasks would complete successfully. The content manager was initialized successfully. Even the BiBus process started successfully (doh!). I could see connections going from the content manager to the MS SQL content store.
We created a completely new content store on the same DB environment (to eliminate any environment problems) and Cognos started fine. This eliminated any issues with the app environment and left the db / content store environment.
We took a backup of the existing content db from MSSQL and recreated it on a completely separate environment. We then pointed an app environment to this content db and this started fine!
The problem that we had now was to get this back into our production environment. We did a regular full content store export from Cognos Administration and imported this export into the production environment.
To this day, we have no idea why the original production environment failed to start.
One important lesson that I learnt that day was that having a file level backup of the content db just wasn't enough. In addition to it, a full content store export as an additional backup is also a good idea.
The perils usually came when I had to work late on getting Cognos environments up for our customers and my stubborn wife insisted on staying up and keeping me company (shooting daggers at me all the time, mind it) while I was up troubleshooting issues with IBM ;-)
One such situation was when I had to work with IBM support on getting an environment up that refused to come up, no matter what we tried to do. The content store was on a Microsoft SQL Server environment and the startup process would complete successfully. The only exception was that the dispatcher would not complete initialization successfully.
The environment was a default install with all components installed and configured with the default settings. The dispatcher, gateway and content manager were set with the default settings. There was no configuration that was edited or customized.
All startup tasks would complete successfully. The content manager was initialized successfully. Even the BiBus process started successfully (doh!). I could see connections going from the content manager to the MS SQL content store.
We created a completely new content store on the same DB environment (to eliminate any environment problems) and Cognos started fine. This eliminated any issues with the app environment and left the db / content store environment.
We took a backup of the existing content db from MSSQL and recreated it on a completely separate environment. We then pointed an app environment to this content db and this started fine!
The problem that we had now was to get this back into our production environment. We did a regular full content store export from Cognos Administration and imported this export into the production environment.
To this day, we have no idea why the original production environment failed to start.
One important lesson that I learnt that day was that having a file level backup of the content db just wasn't enough. In addition to it, a full content store export as an additional backup is also a good idea.
