Žiga Vaupot's Blog

28th annual event  Make IT 2023  took place in Portorož, Slovenia, between 1st and 2nd June 2023. The conference actually consists of two conferences:            As organisers, we are very pleased with the conference which has grown in terms of the content  presented and also regarding the number of attendees which has surpassed 350.   I've been involved with organisation as a member of the organising committee, however personally, my preference lies of course with  Make IT - SIOUG 2023 , where I delivered two presentations: OCI Vision and Oracle Analytics: Just like a Box of Chocolates OCI Vision is a self-service AI Service, which applies computer vision to analyze image-based content. It allows developers easily integrate pre-trained models into their applications with APIs or custom training models to meet their specific use cases. In our example, I will explore how to use OCI Vision service to create a custom-bui...

Maps Conditional Formatting Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) is now updated frequently on a bi-monthly basis, continuously adding valuable features that enhance user experience and analytical capabilities. The recent May Update, announced just a week ago, introduces several exciting new features and functionalities . One feature that caught my attention is Maps Conditional Formatting —a powerful option that allows you to highlight key data points directly within map visualizations, just as you can with other chart types. So, how does it work? It’s actually very straightforward, using the same conditional formatting model familiar to users from other visualization types. The map above is our starting point, showing profitability by country. Simple and clear, but without any conditional highlights. To apply conditional formatting, click on the traffic light icon ( Manage Conditional Formatting Rules ). This opens the Conditional Formatting popup window. Here, you can choose whether...

Being able to talk to computers using natural language, especially with the recent advancements in general AI models like ChatGPT, has become very popular in the last few months. Everyone is doing it. It's simple, easy to use, and frankly, it can be very useful. What has been around for a while—think Siri, Alexa, or TV remote controllers—has now been taken to a new level and is already widely used in business. In Oracle Analytics, Natural Language Recognition has been available for several years. I remember the early days when the Oracle Day by Day mobile application was introduced. One of the coolest features in Day by Day was the ability to ask questions using natural language. For example, What is revenue by region and channel for seniors? would provide an answer in the form of charts, tables, and more. This feature is still available today, and you can ask such questions in the Search field located on the Oracle Analytics home page. Oracle Analytics then provides the f...

About Watchlists In this post, I will introduce a powerful usability feature in Oracle Analytics called Watchlists. Watchlists provide users with a convenient way to monitor and interact with their most important visualizations directly from the home page, without needing to open full reports or workbooks. This feature helps users stay informed with live data updates at a glance and improves productivity by reducing the time spent searching for frequently used content. Users often rely on a specific set of reports or analyses in their daily work. Oracle Analytics allows users to mark these reports or analyses as favorites, which places them in the Favorite Workbooks section on the Oracle Analytics Home Page for quick access. Watchlists take this concept further by enabling users to add individual visualizations from their workbooks to a dedicated section on the home page, allowing them to review key insights immediately. Watchlists were initially introduced in Oracle Analytic...

Gartner has published its  Magic Quadrants for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms  (Gartner, 2023) report for 2023, on April 5th.  As usually, it presents how various analytics and BI vendors position regarding the completeness of their vision and ability to execute. It is considered as “the go-to resource” when evaluating and comparing these technologies. In this post, I am trying to look at Oracle’s position and explain why Oracle is placed where it is placed - in Visionaries quadrant. Of course, everything from here on, is my personal view and experience. Personally, as I said, I am mostly interested in Oracle’s position which is (if I recall correctly) in Visionaries quadrant for the 3rd straight year in the row. It seems that Oracle with its Oracle Analytics Cloud has the strongest completeness of vision among all Visionaries, and in general only Microsoft seems stronger in this respect. But on the other hand side, there is quite a crowd of vendors in Vi...

Using AutoML in Oracle Analytics Approximately one year ago, I have written a blog post Training and deploying AutoML models in Oracle Data Lakehouse . This blog post was part of my Oracle Data Lakehouse blog series, was focusing on training and deploying AutoML models in Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW). Besides that, the post was also focusing on storing and managing data files in object storage and registering them as external tables in ADW. AutoML generated models are stored and deployed in ADW as any other OML models. If you want to use these models in Oracle Analytics you have to manually register OML model with Oracle Analytics and use it. There is a small detail regarding the location of data to be used with such a model - data has to reside in the same database where model is deployed. Not to mention, that user has to log into OML Notebooks in ADW and perform the training there. In the latest, March 2023 Update, release this is no longer needed as Oracle Analytics ...