Oracle Analytics September 2022 Update has just came out. At least our instance got patched over the last night.
There are two major updates in this release, which I plan to cover in my future posts:
- The first new feature relates to the usage of REST APIs. Oracle Analytics can now connect to REST API data sources, such as Saas or PaaS applications. This feature is still in Preview, but available.
Speaking of REST APIs, there is another nice feature that addresses snapshot management and data loading. Snapshots (BAR files) can be now managed programmatically using REST APIs. Similarly developers can programatically load their data for datasets using REST APIs. I believe both features will be welcomed by developers community. - Even bigger, really MAJOR update is Semantic Modeller which will one day eventually replace good old BI Administration Tool. Semantic Modeller was available for Preview (and it still is) in July update.
We, at Qubix have been involved with testing Semantic Modeller before it came out officially. My colleague Joel Acha, Oracle ACE Pro, has posted several blog posts on this topic in Qubix Blog.
When it became available back in July I additionally tested some new features, such as version control by using Git (in my case Github). I am still not sure what happened but I managed to crash the system. So maybe, just maybe, use Semantic Modeller with caution.
We can also see again some nice improvements which I will focus on in this post:
- Display tile visualisation with other visualisations.
- Change table and pivot table headers.
- New look & feel when using filters.
Nevertheless, the complete list of What’s New for Oracle Analytics Cloud can be found in the latest Oracle documentation. And let’s check out the ones listed above.
The Tiles
One of the key features of Oracle Fusion Analytics Warehouse (FAW) is support for KPIs. This concept unfortunately is not available (at the moment) in Oracle Analytics. Personally, I miss KPIs as this is probably the most efficient way of building dashboard style analyses for management.
Let’s take a look at the analysis below. In the top visualisation row, you can see three different presentations of Performance Tile visualisation.
Performance Tile has been around since the beginning. The idea of Performance Tiles is to present key information important for decision makers to observe.
What Performance Tile displays is one single metric, which can be conditionally formatted and there is a possibility to draw a simple chart. This chart can be a line, a bar or an area, but with no details describing it in more detail. In general it is more used to show basic trends or relationships, but nothing more.
For example, Performance Tile visualisation displays number of customers and the line chart presents number of customers over some selected period.
In my opinion, this is nice, but it is not enough. Managers and other business users would like to see more. At least, some additional measures, for example Number of Customers in the same period last year or something like that should be display alongside the primary measure.
In the latest Oracle Analytics update, this has been now improved. As you can see in the chart below (btw. it presents same information as Performance Tile above) we have Line Chart visualisation that has additional field Tile in grammar pane. The same has been now added to other visualisations as well.
By adding a measure into a new grammar field, the value is displayed the same way as it is in Performance Tile visualisation.
But this is not the only enhancement as there can be more than one measure placed in the Tile field. When more than one measure is placed in Tile field, the first measure takes the role of a primary measure and other measures are treated as secondary.
In the properties section of the chart, formatting such as alignments, custom titles, fonts for the Tile can be set.
Each measure can be additional conditionally formatted.
Analysis with “updated" Performance Tile (top left visualisation is formatted Line Chart with Tile) can now be presented as follows:
But, this is still not the KPI visualisation, as KPI is actually is based on the framework that helps developers developing KPI cards. As already mentioned, these can be found in FAW, which is built on top of Oracle Analytics (see picture below), but I guess we are slowly getting there. Hopefully as soon as possible.
Changing table and pivot table headers
Trivial things over which you, as a developer or a user, haven’t got any control are the most annoying. Not being able to change and control table headers is definitely one of them. Well, this is (finally) fixed :).
Let take at this simple table below.
And let’s say you wanted to change and format table headers for ORDER_STATUS and ORDER_KEY. This was not possible up until now (!).
Now we have additional parameters which control headers of each column.
For example, after changing the parameters above, our pivot table could look like this:
As I said, really minor, but very useful update.
New look & feel when using filters
The next update falls into the category of usability improvements. There are no changes in functionality of filters, but you can observe a new look and fill in how filters are displayed and managed.
The filter line looks a bit more narrow than before. As it can be seen in the picture below, there is no menu icon next to the attribute.
You can access all filter features simply by clicking on it. Depending on the attribute type, appropriate filter settings and options are displayed.
For example, ORDER_STATUS is a categorical attribute. It can be used as a List filter or Top/Bottom filter related to a selected metric. All options are now presented immediately instead of selecting them through array of menu choices.
The same is valid for numerical attributes such as REVENUE. The only difference is that numeric attributes are associated with Range filters instead of List filters.
And the same is valid for Date filters as well. Parametrisation of filters is now done in a popup property window. Previously all parameters were access via menu choices. In my opinion, more user friendly and faster.
Simplification is also with Expression Filters. Previously, there was additional menu in filter bar which also contained Add Expression Filter option.
Now, this selection is done simply from the filter bar when user click on add sign (+). There is an option below the list of available attributes: Add Expression Filter.
The bottom line, again small update, but I believe very useful as clears up a lot of space otherwise occupied by filters.
Conclusion
Oracle Analytics September 2022 Update brings a number of improvements from which major updates are without doubt Semantic Modeller and increased use of REST API for connecting to REST data sources and for management of Analytics.
But on the other hand side, I think there are small things that are going to improve usability and user friendliness of Oracle Analytics. And even though these are small updates are as important as the major updates.
At the end of the day, business users don’t really care which tool is used for data modelling or how snapshots are created. What matters is simplicity and easy of use, effective presentation of data and well beyond all usability of information presented in analyses. Remember Excel?