Andrei Mitiaev

• May 26th, 2006

 

Cognos Powerhouse is High-Productivity Application Development Solutions equips you with high-productivity development environments for creating your data-driven business solutions faster,whether for Web-based, client/server, or traditional terminal-based access. PowerHouse has gained a worldwide reputation for productivity, reliability, performance, and flexibility.

swift_s

 Profile Answers by swift_s 

• Aug 4th, 2009

 

Cognos PowerHouse (4GL, Web, Axiant) is an Application Development tool. It
was Cognos' main bread&butter product prior to BI tools becoming so popular.
It's hayday was in the 1990's as it was for most 4GLs. 4GLs went out of focus
for most IT depts when Java became king of the programming languages.

This is not to say 4GLs are irrelevant. They possess attributes which still
make them the faster method of delivering robust, data driven business
applications in a much shorter time than OOP/3GLs.

PowerHouse uses a data dictionary (similar to the meta data repository used
by Cognos 8 BI) so programmers don't have deal with file/table handling and
discovering data definitions. It comes in three flavours - terminal based,
client-server (Axiant) and web. There is a report writing tool (Quiz, Cognos'
original product when it started as Quasar in 1969), form generator (Quick), and
a transaction processor (QTP).

PowerHouse Web is a very good solution for data warehouse implementations
that need to maintain reference data not found elsewhere and therefore cannot be
sourced using an ETL process. It is multi-platform (UNIX, Windows, OpenVMS, MVS,
etc) and very scalable.

Cognos Transformer originally used PowerHouse technology and some of it has
found its way into other Cognos tools.

I believe Cognos should merge the data dictionary components of PowerHouse
and Cognos 8 BI so that the tools can be integrated better.