High­lights from The Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud Septem­ber 2024 Update

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Wel­come back to another edi­tion of our Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud (OAC) blog series! In this art­icle, we’ll high­light the OAC updates from Septem­ber 2024 that prom­ise to improve the Oracle user experience.

We’ll also guide you through the fea­tures from the Explor­a­tion, Dash­board­ing, and Storytelling areas, offer­ing you detailed insights on how these changes can enhance your analytics.

The Oracle world is huge, so if you want to go deeper into this new ver­sion, or revisit pre­vi­ous ones, just click on this link!

Cre­ate Cal­cu­la­tion-Based Groups More Easily

Oracle, as an ana­lyt­ical tool, is con­tinu­ally optim­ising its cal­cu­la­tion cre­ation. In this release, there are two new fea­tures to help you to develop your cal­cu­la­tions more eas­ily, which we’ll be cov­er­ing today.

With the first fea­ture, group cal­cu­la­tions are now code-free and don’t require extens­ive logical SQL state­ments – you can cre­ate a group cal­cu­la­tion either by right-click­ing on the column you want to group, or by select­ing the group cal­cu­la­tion option from the My Cal­cu­la­tions folder. In this example, we’ll group job pos­i­tions into categories:

After select­ing the Cre­ate Group Cal­cu­la­tion option, you need to name the group cal­cu­la­tion (in this case, Job Cat­egor­ies); then add the desired num­ber of groups by click­ing on + Group. The groups will appear on the left, in dif­fer­ent col­ours. In our example, there are six dif­fer­ent groups:

After the cat­egor­ies have been cre­ated, you’ll need to assign each value to its cor­res­pond­ing group. In this case, each job pos­i­tion must be con­nec­ted to a spe­cific job cat­egory. As you do this, a real-time pre­view on the right-hand side dis­plays the cat­egor­ies and the num­ber of val­ues being assigned to each.

After assign­ing the val­ues, click on Save. Your group cal­cu­la­tion will then appear in the My Cal­cu­la­tions folder:

After cre­at­ing the group cal­cu­la­tion, you can right-click on it to either edit the group cal­cu­la­tion itself by select­ing Edit Cal­cu­la­tion, or modify the under­ly­ing logical SQL expres­sion by select­ing Copy Expres­sion:

For the second option, Copy Expres­sion, cre­ate a nor­mal cal­cu­la­tion, then copy the SQL expres­sion and paste it there to make your edits:

Finally, you’ll be able to cre­ate graph­ics with the group cal­cu­la­tion. In this example, we want to see the num­ber of absences for each job category:

What’s more, you can also cre­ate group cal­cu­la­tions on exist­ing cal­cu­la­tions, if they are text attrib­utes, by fol­low­ing the same steps as above. In the example below, the Job Cat­egor­ies cal­cu­la­tion that we cre­ated is being used to cre­ate another group calculation:

Cre­ate Cal­cu­la­tions More Easily

As you may know, some cal­cu­la­tions can be com­posed of other cal­cu­la­tion items; these are com­monly referred to as nes­ted cal­cu­la­tions. Cre­at­ing and sav­ing pre­vi­ous cal­cu­la­tion items helps you to achieve a more organ­ised and com­pre­hens­ible final code structure.

This second cal­cu­la­tion fea­ture we’re focus­ing on allows you to cre­ate nes­ted cal­cu­la­tions without los­ing their ref­er­ence while copy-past­ing them in a new cal­cu­la­tion, item, or notebook…

Let’s see how it works with this example:

Open your work­book in Edit mode and cre­ate a new cal­cu­la­tion; we’ll use a simple example for the pur­poses of this article.

Go to My Cal­cu­la­tions and select Cre­ate Cal­cu­la­tion… then add the fol­low­ing expres­sion and save it with a suit­able name:

The next step is to cre­ate a new cal­cu­la­tion, using the cal­cu­la­tion from the first step. In this example, we first cal­cu­lated the rev­enue per product, and now we will cal­cu­late it as a percentage:

Now it’s time to lever­age this new fea­ture. If you want to copy and paste this nes­ted cal­cu­la­tion into another work­book, cal­cu­la­tion, or a file for doc­u­ment­a­tion pur­poses, you can use the Copy Expan­ded Expres­sion option by right-click­ing on your new cal­cu­la­tion, as shown below:

Once selec­ted, this popup will appear at the top of the canvas:

This allows you to copy and paste the expres­sion, includ­ing the defin­i­tions of the cal­cu­lated items used within it, ensur­ing that their ref­er­ences are retained in the expres­sion. In this case, the ‘Rev­enue per Product [%]’ is:

(“PC1″.”Orderlines”.”Price” * “PC1″.”Orderlines”.”Quantity”) / sum(( “PC1″.”Orderlines”.”Price” * “PC1″.”Orderlines”.”Quantity” )) * 100

To sum­mar­ise, you can cre­ate a cal­cu­la­tion in your work­book and use it within another cal­cu­la­tion, with the new expres­sion cor­rectly incor­por­at­ing all the ref­er­enced items.

Deploy Static Ref­er­ence Lay­ers to Maps

You can now add static ref­er­ence map lay­ers to your map visu­al­isa­tions, even when there’s no busi­ness data related to these lay­ers. For example, you could dis­play a map of schools and over­lay a static map layer show­ing a tor­nado path to identify build­ings at risk.

This fea­ture enhances map visu­al­isa­tions by allow­ing the inclu­sion of rel­ev­ant ref­er­ence data, improv­ing the over­all present­a­tion and context.

Fol­low these steps to har­ness this feature:

Then select Maps from Visu­al­iz­a­tions and Shar­ing:

And now select Ref­er­ence Lay­ers, where you’ll find the option to Add Cus­tom Layer:

Then ensure that you have a prop­erly format­ted GeoJSON file, which will be required for use in the map visu­al­isa­tions. After upload­ing the file, save it using an appro­pri­ate name for easy identification:

Once the GeoJSON file has been saved, you can now use it dir­ectly within the map reports avail­able in your Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud.

For the pur­poses of this art­icle, the map will dis­play all European coun­tries on a world map.

To integ­rate the GeoJSON file into your reports, fol­low the steps below:

Go to the Prop­er­ties option, then select Lay­ers, and click on the + icon:

When you click on the + icon, select the Add Ref­er­ence Layer option and you will see your new layer in the Map Layer sec­tion. In this example it’s labelled ‘Europe Map’. Upon select­ing the layer, its name will be updated auto­mat­ic­ally (see below):

This new fea­ture is simple to imple­ment and seam­lessly integ­rates into your reports. It allows the inclu­sion of external, non-busi­ness data, which can enhance your over­all analysis.

By enabling richer and more con­tex­tual data integ­ra­tion, this fea­ture sup­ports more informed and stra­tegic decision-making.

Select Fil­ter Styles for Dash­board Filters

This update brings new options for dash­board fil­ter styles, provid­ing authors with more flex­ib­il­ity when design­ing the user exper­i­ence in work­books. These new prop­er­ties, along­side exist­ing ones, give authors greater flex­ib­il­ity in design­ing an optimal end-user exper­i­ence in workbooks.

Fil­ter Style

To change the fil­ter style, nav­ig­ate to the Fil­ter Style prop­erty in Gen­eral Set­tings and switch from Stand­ard to Fil­ter Chip. While the Fil­ter Type prop­erty in the Fil­ter Con­trols set­tings remains unchanged, the visu­al­isa­tion dif­fers. In this new fil­ter style, users click on the fil­ter to reveal the data they wish to fil­ter, rather than see­ing it dis­played dir­ectly. This com­pact fil­ter style not only frees up space for addi­tional charts and visu­al­isa­tions, but also offers greater con­trol over label place­ment, mean­ing a more flex­ible and refined user experience:

Con­trol Style

It is now pos­sible to edit the fil­ter style itself, as well as the back­ground. You can cus­tom­ise col­our and trans­par­ency set­tings by going to the Con­trol Style prop­erty and adjust­ing these set­tings as necessary:

Switch Between Auto and Manual Present Modes

OAC now offers a quicker way to switch between Auto and Manual modes in Present mode, provid­ing users with more flex­ib­il­ity dur­ing presentations.

In Present mode, you can choose between Auto and Manual modes, each offer­ing dif­fer­ent options for con­trolling your present­a­tion flow. Auto is selec­ted by default, while Manual offers more flex­ib­il­ity, allow­ing you to tailor the present­a­tion pace and trans­itions. If you want to switch to Manual mode, fol­low these steps.

Open your work­book in Edit mode, and nav­ig­ate from the Visu­al­ize to the Present tab, up in the centre:

Once in the Present tab, the icon to switch between Auto and Manual modes is loc­ated at the bot­tom of the can­vas and is rep­res­en­ted by a lock icon. Next to this icon there is a descrip­tion out­lining the impact of the selec­ted mode. When switch­ing between Auto and Manual modes, a pop-up win­dow will appear, explain­ing the changes that will occur. In Manual mode, you can change the can­vas order, rename, delete, duplic­ate, or hide canvases. In Auto mode, the only avail­able action is to hide a canvas:

Manual:

Auto:

For more details on the fea­tures and options avail­able in these modes, and to determ­ine which best suits your needs, you can refer to the offi­cial Oracle doc­u­ment­a­tion at this link.

Con­clu­sions

This release high­lights advance­ments in cal­cu­la­tions and the enhanced power of map visu­al­isa­tions, allow­ing mul­tiple data mod­els to be visu­al­ised sim­ul­tan­eously. A new fil­ter type has been intro­duced, provid­ing refined con­trol over data inter­ac­tions and deliv­er­ing a smoother user exper­i­ence, improv­ing data explor­a­tion. These fea­tures are integ­ral to OAC’s Explor­a­tion, Dash­board­ing, and Storytelling capabilities.

As well as the new fea­tures intro­duced in this Septem­ber 2024 release, OAC has also made sig­ni­fic­ant improve­ments in other areas that enhance its effi­ciency and user experience.

In the areas of Data Con­nectiv­ity, Mod­el­ling, and Pre­par­a­tion, one key devel­op­ment is the sim­pli­fied dur­a­tion cal­cu­la­tion within work­books. Users can now eas­ily com­pute the time between two dates or timestamps in units such as years, months, or weeks, stream­lin­ing data ana­lysis workflows.

In the Aug­men­ted Ana­lyt­ics and Machine Learn­ing domains, the intro­duc­tion of cus­tom OCI lan­guage mod­els is a standout fea­ture. This update allows users to deploy cus­tom mod­els for tasks such as named entity recog­ni­tion and text clas­si­fic­a­tion dir­ectly from OAC, enabling more adap­ted and accur­ate data insights.

Regard­ing Per­form­ance, Com­pli­ance, and Admin­is­tra­tion, Admin­is­trat­ors now have improved con­trol over the default beha­viour of fil­ters in work­books. This fea­ture allows them to define whether fil­ter selec­tions should limit each other by default, offer­ing greater flex­ib­il­ity in man­aging data inter­ac­tions and refin­ing the over­all user experience.

These updates all ensure that OAC remains a power­ful and adapt­able plat­form for driv­ing intel­li­gent, data-driven decision-mak­ing across organisations.

At synvert, we are ded­ic­ated to help­ing you make the most of the latest OAC fea­tures. Reach out to us today to enhance your data ana­lysis and con­vert your insights into impact­ful visualisations!