Connecting IBM Cognos BI to the IBM Business Monitor reporting database

The last few weeks I have been struggling to get Cognos within Business Monitor to connect to the Monitor database correctly.   After a lot of trial and error and some help from Cognos and BPM experts I have now got this working and managed to repeat the process on several environments.

The initial error appeared when trying to deploy a Monitor model - this was documented in this technote .   When logging onto the Cognos admin console, the test connection on the database would work for the thin client but fail for the thick client as this wasn't installed at the time.

As we were using a back end Oracle database I installed the Oracle instant client.   Even though I was running 64 bit WAS, Business Monitor and Oracle, the client that Cognos requires is a 32 bit version.

Once this was installed, I then set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH on the application server running the cognos dispatcher.   This is in the WAS admin console:   Application servers ==>  <server name> ==> Java and process management ==> Process definition ==> Environment entries

I added the <oracle_client_dir>/lib to the LB_LIBRARY_PATH.  Just adding the install dir didn't fix the problem and it appears you need to add the /lib so WAS knows where to find the .so file.

As the processes were running as non-root I needed to ensure that the JVMs could access the oracle directories so in the profile of the WAS user I added:

export ORACLE_HOME=/u001/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/client_1
export ORACLE_SID=myDB
export ORACLE_BASE=/u001/app/oracle
export TNS_ADMIN=/u001/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/client_1/network/admin
export TWO_TASK=myDB

After this a restart of the environment meant I could successfully run a test connection with the cognos admin console.