Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud – High­lights from the Janu­ary 2023 Update

There is no bet­ter way to start the new year than with a new Oracle Cloud release. Janu­ary has brought us a bunch of new fea­tures. We have tested and ana­lysed some of them, and here is an over­view of those that we found the most interesting.

1. Improved Home Page

In Janu­ary 2023, Oracle improved Home page nav­ig­a­tion by redesign­ing it and mak­ing it more cus­tom­is­able. Let’s look at the dif­fer­ences between the old and the new versions.

To cus­tom­ise the Home page, click Page Menu, then Cus­tom­ize Home Page:

In earlier edi­tions, there was already the option to change how con­tent was dis­played; we could select from Hid­den, Tiny, Stand­ard, and Mosaic. Now we can select between a Hid­den, Small, Medium, or Large dis­play option when we hover over a cat­egory icon. Below we can see the dif­fer­ence between the old and new dis­play con­tent possibilities:

What’s also new is the pos­sib­il­ity to spe­cify how many rows we want to show for each cat­egory. Click on Row, then choose an option from the list (up to six rows of con­tent per category):

By click­ing on the handle next to the cat­egory and drag­ging it to a new pos­i­tion, we can change the order of con­tent cat­egor­ies such as What’s New, Favor­ites, Work­books, Dash­boards and Reports, Data­sets, and others.

We can also open edit­ors in a new tab, by select­ing Open Edit­ors in New Tabs.

Let’s go through a small illus­tra­tion of how it works: we arranged our con­tent cat­egor­ies and placed the Work­books con­tent cat­egory at the top of our Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Home page, selec­ted the Small dis­play option with 3 Rows. As you can see in the pic­ture below, the Work­books con­tent cat­egory is now dis­played as three rows of dif­fer­ent items:

2. Improved Exper­i­ence for the Gram­mar and Prop­erty Panels

Oracle has rolled out a new exper­i­ence for the Prop­erty panel. Pre­vi­ously, when we clicked on the visu­al­isa­tion, the Prop­erty panel was below the Data panel. You often had to expand the Prop­erty panel, thus hid­ing the columns in the Data panel, impact­ing the user experience:

In the new update, Oracle has moved the Prop­erty panel from below the Data panel to the area next to the Gram­mar panel. This enables us to see the Data panel and to toggle between the Gram­mar and the Prop­erty pan­els while build­ing the con­tent, as you can see in the image below:

You can now enjoy an improved user exper­i­ence because you no longer need to hide the Data panel columns to see the list of prop­er­ties. The prop­er­ties that we see in the new lay­out are the same as they were before the update.

3. Improved Tile Visualisation

In the pre­vi­ous ver­sion, we could only add one meas­ure to a tile. The new ver­sion allows us to add one or more meas­ures to a tile visu­al­isa­tion and to spe­cify the lay­out and pos­i­tion­ing of labels and val­ues for the primary meas­ure and mul­tiple sec­ond­ary meas­ures. Addi­tion­ally, con­di­tional format­ting rules can be applied to both the primary and sec­ond­ary measures.

Sev­eral meas­ures in a tile visu­al­isa­tion can come in handy when we want to dis­play meas­ures related to each other, without hav­ing to cre­ate each meas­ure as a sep­ar­ate tile, thus over­crowding the dash­board. Let’s ima­gine that we are build­ing a fin­an­cial dash­board where we have tar­gets and actu­als. Before this update, if we wanted to show the actual num­ber, the tar­get, and how close we are to reach­ing it, we would have to cre­ate 3 tiles. With the new tile, we are able to dis­play all 3 meas­ures in one tile in a nice, organ­ised way.

In the Visu­al­iz­a­tions panel, in the More sec­tion, we can see a new Tile visu­al­isa­tion, next to the pre­vi­ous ver­sion which is marked as deprec­ated and will most likely be removed in future releases:

In the examples below, we will demon­strate the new tile visu­al­isa­tion cap­ab­il­it­ies. We’ve taken data from the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup with total goals scored as the primary meas­ure and total pen­alty goals and total own goals as sec­ond­ary measures:

In the Prop­er­ties panel of the tile visu­al­isa­tion, there are sev­eral prop­er­ties that you can apply to the primary and sec­ond­ary meas­ures, like their pos­i­tions, label pos­i­tion, ori­ent­a­tion of the sec­ond­ary meas­ures, and so on:

Based on our needs and report­ing require­ments, we can con­di­tion­ally format our data in the Con­di­tional Format­ting dia­log. For example, we added two rules to our tile visu­al­isa­tion, one for own goals (if the num­ber of own goals scored in the World Cup is more than 6, format the tile in red) and one for total goals scored (if the num­ber of total goals scored in the World Cup is higher than 120, format the tile in green):

When we turn on the rules, we see how they behave depend­ing on whether a meas­ure is primary or secondary.

If a tile has con­di­tional format­ting set on a primary meas­ure, the rule affects the entire tile’s back­ground col­our. When con­di­tional format­ting is set on a sec­ond­ary meas­ure, only the back­ground col­our of the value is changed, regard­less of whether the primary meas­ure has con­di­tional format­ting set or not.

In the example below, we will first apply a con­di­tional rule to the sec­ond­ary meas­ure, total own goals. Even if there is no other con­di­tional format­ting applied, the back­ground col­our is applied only to the value itself:

Next, we will apply a con­di­tional rule to the primary meas­ure, total goals scored. When a rule is applied to a primary meas­ure, the whole tile back­ground col­our is changed:

Although Oracle offers many format­ting options, con­di­tional format­ting still has room for improve­ment: it would be nice to be able to apply more con­di­tional format­ting options other than just chan­ging the back­ground col­our, as the design feels a bit lim­ited. Nev­er­the­less, it’s a step in the right dir­ec­tion, and hope­fully more options will be avail­able in the future.

4. Auto­mat­ic­ally Cal­cu­late Time Dur­a­tions such as Year, Month, and Day

In this example we are going to show how to eas­ily cal­cu­late time dur­a­tions such as year, month, and day in our data­sets with semantic recom­mend­a­tions in the Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Data­set Editor.

This fea­ture com­pares the value of our date column to the sys­tem date and can there­fore be very use­ful in many scen­arios, cal­cu­lat­ing things like age, employee ten­ure, time remain­ing on a con­tract, to name but a few.

In our example, we are going to to eval­u­ate this fea­ture by upload­ing an accountinfo_sales.xlsx doc­u­ment provided by Oracle. First, we click on Cre­ate Data­set and select the option to upload it from our com­puter. We can see the uploaded file in the image below:

We then double-click on the green box dis­play­ing the name of the file to enter the Pre­par­a­tion Script mode, where we can see the Recom­mend­a­tions panel on the right where the pro­filer auto­mat­ic­ally detects the column data types and adds best prac­tice recommendations:

Our file con­tains account inform­a­tion of vari­ous data types, but for this example, we will focus on the Date fields.

When we click on each field, a set of recom­mend­a­tions is gen­er­ated based on the prop­er­ties of the data, so in our case, click­ing on the date fields offers a recom­mend­a­tion for extract­ing parts of the date, like the year, month, day of the week, etc.

At the bot­tom of Recom­mend­a­tions there are also some recom­mend­a­tions to extract time inter­vals in dif­fer­ent meas­ures, such as year, month, and day:

By accept­ing one of these recom­mend­a­tions, we will be cre­at­ing a for­mula which can be edited, that will dynam­ic­ally cal­cu­late the dur­a­tions based on the cur­rent date. For example, to cal­cu­late how old the users are, we click on the Extract Age in Years from birth­d­ate recom­mend­a­tion. A new column is created:

We can also view the for­mula that was cre­ated for us, and edit it if necessary:

Since these cal­cu­la­tions are based on the cur­rent date, they are dynamic and their val­ues will auto­mat­ic­ally change.

5. Post Logout Redirect

A new Post Logout Redir­ect URL secur­ity option is avail­able on the Sys­tem Set­tings page, allow­ing admin­is­trat­ors to select the URL to which users will be redir­ec­ted when they log out of Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud. For instance, we might want to dis­play sign-in inform­a­tion that opens the clas­sic Home page, or re-route users to a com­pany website:

The Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud instance does not need to be restar­ted to change this set­ting, but if the instance was cre­ated before Janu­ary 23, 2023, a ser­vice request with Oracle Sup­port will need to be cre­ated for it to take effect.

Con­clu­sion

Oracle has released the first update of 2023 with sev­eral new fea­tures, enhance­ments, and fixes that improve the over­all OAC user experience.

Take advant­age of the per­son­al­isa­tion options and nav­ig­ate the newly redesigned Home page with ease. In all Work­books, the Prop­er­ties panel is now loc­ated next to the Gram­mar panel for sim­pler nav­ig­a­tion. Updated tile visu­al­isa­tion allows us to add met­rics and it also provides the lay­out and pos­i­tion­ing of labels and val­ues for primary and sec­ond­ary measures.

Auto­matic cal­cu­la­tion of time dur­a­tion by com­par­ing the sys­tem date with years, months, and days is a great addi­tion to the semantic recom­mend­a­tions in the Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Data­set Editor, and to com­plete the user exper­i­ence, they have added the abil­ity to redir­ect users to a spe­cific web page when they log out of Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud.

In the mean­time, if you want to see how Oracle can bring even more value to your busi­ness, just get in touch with our cer­ti­fied and exper­i­enced consultants!