Drill-through reporting allows you to link from one report to another. You can drill through in a number of ways, for example from one report to another, a query to a report, or a multidimensional analysis to a report.

The ability to drill through has a number of advantages. For example, a multidimensional analysis in Analysis Studio may only contain summarised information. For example, the data source might contain total revenue for each team, by month. This data is summarised to Team level and also Month level. Since it takes processing time to summarise data at each level, the dimensional analysis would be slowed down by another level in both the Time and Location levels (which contain the Months and Teams).

Instead, a report is produced to list detailed information for each team member, and this is held for each week rather than month. The drill-down will allow the user access to this information without compromising the processing and retrieval times for the multidimensional analysis.

Another advantage of using drill-through reporting is that a single drill-through report can be used in a number of ways. The drill-through may be defined in Cognos Connection, which allows access to any user with the appropriate permissions.