What’s New in the Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud – May 2023 Release

Wel­come to our blog, where today we’re going to delve into the latest enhance­ments in Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud (OAC). Read on as we show you the power of OAC and unlock new levels of data-driven insights! Don’t for­get to check out our pre­vi­ous blog on Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud – March 2023 to stay up to date with the latest fea­tures and advances. Now let’s dive in and con­tinue our jour­ney of dis­cov­ery, look­ing at some excit­ing new fea­tures from the OAC May 2023 release.

1. Web Semantic Modeler

One of the most not­able enhance­ments in the May 2023 OAC release is the intro­duc­tion of the Semantic Modeler, a power­ful tool that allows users to cre­ate and man­age semantic mod­els for their data sources, enabling a sim­pli­fied and intu­it­ive approach to data mod­el­ling and analysis.

The Semantic Modeler was intro­duced by Oracle in their July 2022 release, but only the pre­view ver­sion was avail­able to users; now the web Semantic Modeler is GA (Gen­eral Avail­ab­il­ity) as of the OAC May release. The synvert team already tested, imple­men­ted and reviewed this fea­ture in a blog post last year, so we are not cov­er­ing it in detail here, but if you want to know more, please check out “Break­through in Cloud BI? New Semantic Mod­el­ler in OAC (Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud).”

2. Con­di­tional Format­ting on Maps

We wrote about the Con­di­tional Format­ting fea­ture in some of our recent blog posts (OAC Janu­ary ‘23 & OAC March ‘23), and although it has been avail­able in Oracle Ana­lyt­ics for some time, there are now a lot of enhance­ments and new addi­tions to this fea­ture. With Con­di­tional Format­ting, we can visu­ally high­light import­ant inform­a­tion, identify trends, and draw atten­tion to spe­cific data points.

For this new release, Oracle has intro­duced Con­di­tional Format­ting on map visu­al­isa­tions. With map visu­al­isa­tions, we can trans­form our data into inter­act­ive and inform­at­ive maps, enabling us to gain valu­able insights based on loc­a­tion. And this new enhance­ment allows us to apply Con­di­tional Format­ting rules dir­ectly to the map, fur­ther improv­ing our abil­ity to high­light and ana­lyse data in a spa­tial con­text. By com­bin­ing the power of Con­di­tional Format­ting and map visu­al­isa­tion, we can uncover pat­terns, trends, and out­liers in our data, lead­ing to even more impact­ful data-driven decisions.

Now let’s run through the pro­cess of cre­at­ing Con­di­tional Format­ting for maps. The first step is to ensure we have the right data­set and then to cre­ate a map visu­al­isa­tion. In the image below we have cre­ated a map visu­al­isa­tion with address details:

There are sev­eral ways to apply Con­di­tional Format­ting to a visu­al­isa­tion. We’re going to right-click on the visu­al­isa­tion and select Con­di­tional Format­ting, as you can see below:

Now we have to define the format­ting con­di­tions. For example, we can set con­di­tions based on data val­ues, such as sales rev­enue above a cer­tain threshold. We just choose the format­ting style or options we want to apply when the con­di­tions are met, which could include chan­ging the marker col­our, adjust­ing the marker size, or using dif­fer­ent sym­bols or icons:

Below is a pre­view of the map visu­al­isa­tion we cre­ated, with Con­di­tional Format­ting applied:

We can also change the scope of the format­ting accord­ing to cer­tain con­di­tions – here, for example, we have changed the scope to apply the format­ting to a spe­cific region of the map only:

And now we have a map visu­al­isa­tion that shows rev­enue only for the EMEA regions, as selec­ted in the scope of the Con­di­tional Format­ting tab.

3. Con­di­tional Annota­tions (Rule-Based) on Visualisations

Con­di­tional Annota­tions is an OAC fea­ture that allows us to dynam­ic­ally add annota­tions to our data based on spe­cific con­di­tions or cri­teria. With Con­di­tional Annota­tions, we can provide con­tex­tual inform­a­tion, explan­a­tions, or addi­tional insights to enhance the under­stand­ing of our data. Unfor­tu­nately, this fea­ture is still not avail­able for map visu­al­isa­tions, but hope­fully it will come out soon! Until then, we’ll have to visu­al­ise this on a dif­fer­ent chart.

Let’s imple­ment this fea­ture with the example shown below. In this scat­ter chart, dif­fer­ent cat­egor­ies of products are plot­ted accord­ing to sales and profits on the X and Y axes:

We’ll now high­light the products with the highest profits (>50,000), and to do so we’ll cre­ate a Con­di­tional Format­ting rule as shown below. By apply­ing this rule, products with profits greater than 50,000 will stand out, allow­ing users to quickly identify and focus on these high-profit items.

Under the format tab of the above con­di­tion, we add a Note that says, “Products with Highest Profit.”

Finally, after apply­ing this rule to the visu­al­isa­tion, we can see the products that meet the spe­cified con­di­tion have the note linked to them. We can cre­ate mul­tiple notes for mul­tiple rules with Con­di­tional Formatting.

4. Role-Based Fil­ters in Datasets

Dif­fer­ent fil­ter types enable you to focus on the data that you are inter­ested in. Fil­ters based on applic­a­tion roles, known as role-based fil­ters, enable Oracle Ana­lyt­ics busi­ness ana­lysts and users to access only the data they are allowed to see. For example, in a global sales report, we can enable some users to only access data for a cer­tain region (e.g., EMEA). Before this release, this was only pos­sible by defin­ing the roles in the repos­it­ory by cre­at­ing data­sets from sub­ject areas.

Row-level secur­ity in OBIEE and role-based fil­ters in OAC are dif­fer­ent. In OAC, access to the data in a work­book is determ­ined by the user’s role: if a user is not assigned to a par­tic­u­lar role, they won’t be able to access the data in the work­book. This is a very secure approach to data access, as it ensures that only author­ised users can access sens­it­ive data.

How­ever, it’s import­ant to set up the roles cor­rectly to guar­an­tee that users have the appro­pri­ate level of access. This applies to the data­set owner as well (even the super­user won’t be able to see data unless a role is assigned), and although Oracle has recom­men­ded a work­around for this, it needs improve­ment, and we are sure we will see a defin­it­ive solu­tion in future releases.

Now let’s apply a role-based fil­ter to a sample data­set: we will take a simple data­set with region-wise rev­enue, and apply the fil­ter to the Region field.

To cre­ate a role-based fil­ter, select the Join Dia­gram tab in the data­set editor, then click on the Hide or Dis­play the role-based fil­ter bar icon on the top as high­lighted in the image above.

Click on the Add Role icon at the top left, then select the applic­a­tion role we want to apply to the dataset:

Click on the Add Fil­ter icon after select­ing the applic­a­tion role, then apply the appro­pri­ate fil­ter to restrict data access. In this example, we are going to apply a fil­ter on the Region field:

Add the con­di­tion to the Expres­sion editor and click on Apply. We will imme­di­ately notice that the data in the pre­view view of the data­set does not fil­ter after apply­ing this role/filter; nev­er­the­less, data fil­ters will be applied when users access the work­book or data­flows asso­ci­ated with this data­set. If we now log in as a user with an EMEA user’s role and cre­ate a simple work­book with a map visu­al­isa­tion, we can see how the role-based fil­ters are applied – the user can only see the data for the EMEA region.

5. Para­met­ers Enhancements

Para­met­ers were intro­duced in the March 2023 release and the synvert team covered this in an earlier blog post. In this release, when we define a para­meter, Ini­tial Val­ues are no longer man­dat­ory. In the Cre­ate Para­meter win­dow we can see a new option, First Pos­sible Value, which allows us to use the first value as the ini­tial value. Altern­at­ively we can leave it blank, in which case the para­meter holds no value.

The image above shows the new option in the list, First Pos­sible Value.

Con­clu­sion

These latest enhance­ments to Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud have intro­duced valu­able tools for users to explore, cre­ate dash­boards, and tell stor­ies using their data. These updates also include fea­tures such as box plot and scat­ter plot visu­al­isa­tions, improved data con­nectiv­ity, mod­el­ling cap­ab­il­it­ies, and Key­board short­cuts to copy and paste gram­mar columns more easily.

These addi­tions provide users with bet­ter func­tion­al­ity, help­ing them to uncover insights and to improve their ana­lysis work­flows. By lever­aging these advance­ments, users can improve their data ana­lysis cap­ab­il­it­ies and make more informed decisions.

You can learn more about the May release at the Oracle Ana­lyt­ics You­Tube chan­nel, and if you want to see how Oracle Ana­lyt­ics can help you with your par­tic­u­lar use cases, don’t hes­it­ate to get in touch with our team of ded­ic­ated experts here at synvert.