The Cognos Transformer tool is extremely powerful and does a great job of producing cubes via the transformer interface.  The problem I have with Transformer, and the Cognos 8 BI suite, is that it provides no easy way to automatically refresh cube data on a regular schedule.  At every client I visit, they want to refresh cubes regularly for use in Analysis Studio.  It sounds easy enough but when you start to dig deeper you realize that it is not included in the out of the box Cognos functionality. Surprisingly a custom solution is required to achieve this. After each release I continue to wonder why IBM does not include cube refresh functionality within the Cognos Connection scheduling tool.  It seems like it would be the perfect place and relatively simple given how robust the scheduling options are.