New Fea­tures in Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Server 6.4 [March 2022 Release]

Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Server 6.4 is live and offers a set of fea­tures and enhance­ments which have been avail­able to Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud (OAC) users since the release of OAS 5.9 in March 2021. As the OAS update is yearly, all the OAC updates are com­bined from over the last year. The new release cov­ers the fea­tures from end-to-end pro­cess flows, includ­ing data pre­par­a­tion, to sys­tem administration.

For the com­plete list of fea­tures and enhance­ments refer to the Oracle doc­u­ment What’s New for Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Server 2022 (6.4). In this blog post, we are focus­ing on the best new fea­tures of OAS 6.4, avail­able for both Linux x86-64 and Win­dows 64-bit oper­at­ing sys­tems, down­load­able from Oracle e‑delivery.

What’s New?

1. Con­di­tional Formatting:

Oracle has added the con­di­tional format­ting fea­ture to its latest OAS release, so end users can apply con­di­tional format­ting to the work­books in data visu­al­isa­tions. This fea­ture was not avail­able in the earlier release and is the res­ult of a workaround.

You can invoke con­di­tional format­ting from vari­ous places:

1. Hover over a visu­al­isa­tion and click on the stop light icon to cre­ate a format­ting that will be applied spe­cific­ally to that visualisation.
2. Cre­ate a format­ting rule at pro­ject level that applies to mul­tiple visu­al­isa­tions at the same time.

An exist­ing rule can be reused across all visu­al­isa­tions at the same time. This video demon­strates how to use con­di­tional format­ting fea­tures in Oracle Ana­lyt­ics self-ser­vice Data Visualisations.

2. Data Qual­ity Insights:

You can explore your data using Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Data Qual­ity Insights. This fea­ture gives end users an instant visual over­view of the con­tents of all the columns in the data­set. It could be a bar graph or any other visu­al­isa­tion, depend­ing on the con­tent. This helps the user to see some of the qual­ity issues in the data such as mis­spellings, miss­ing or null val­ues, non-stand­ard column names, etc.

The user can apply an instant tem­por­ary fil­ter to the data. When you fil­ter val­ues, Oracle Ana­lyt­ics updates all data columns to instantly dis­play only the rows relat­ing to the fil­ter val­ues you selec­ted. Click again to deselect the filter.

We can per­form the fol­low­ing actions with this new feature:

1. Rename a column.
2. Change nulls into values.
3. Rename a value with a misspelling.

3. Annota­tions on Canvases:

With this fea­ture, you can add notes to canvases and to spe­cific data points to call out areas of interest. You can use notes to annot­ate one or all of the visu­al­isa­tions on a can­vas, or to emphas­ise spe­cific data points in a visu­al­isa­tion, such as columns in a table or clusters in a scat­ter plot. There are many format­ting options avail­able, like chan­ging the font size, col­our, type, etc. A note can be added from the work­book visu­al­isa­tion as shown below:

When you add a note, you can add data con­nect­ors to call out spe­cific points in the visu­al­isa­tion, or you can cre­ate the note and add or adjust the data point con­nect­ors later. Here’s how to do it:

You can also hide/show the notes:

4. Sort Data in Visu­al­isa­tions (Based on Columns not included in the Visualisation):

In this fea­ture the user can sort data in a visu­al­isa­tion with a column that is not included in it. How can you do that? Well, choose the cus­tom sort option from the visu­al­isa­tion and select Sort By, which has dif­fer­ent met­rics to choose from that are not part of that visualisation.

5. On-Can­vas Fil­ter Types:

This new fea­ture allows us to add a fil­ter dir­ectly to the can­vas so that users can fil­ter the data for some or all of the visu­al­isa­tions on the can­vas. On-can­vas fil­ters are dis­played in the Visu­al­ise can­vas, Present can­vas, and in present­a­tion mode. The fil­ter options are avail­able for:

• Dates
• Meas­ures
• Attrib­utes

You can use the prop­erty pane of the can­vas fil­ter to change the beha­viour of the fil­ter type. Some of the types include top 10 cus­tom­ers by sales, last 5 years’ rev­enue, top 10 profits by city, etc.

6. Auto Insights:

Auto Insights is a new fea­ture that is a great way to cre­ate power­ful visu­al­isa­tions using sug­ges­tions gen­er­ated by Oracle Ana­lyt­ics. It auto­mat­ic­ally sug­gests a proper insight into any data set cre­ated in the Oracle Ana­lyt­ics environment.

Oracle Ana­lyt­ics gen­er­ates Auto Insights for most data­set types, but there are some that are excluded, such as:

• Mul­ti­di­men­sional sources like Ess­base, Oracle Plan­ning, etc.
• Data­sets based on sub­ject areas.
• Data­sets based on non-Oracle databases.
• Data­sets gen­er­ated by data flows.
• Data­sets hav­ing more than 75 mil­lion cells or more than 100 columns.

By default, the fea­ture is dis­abled for all data­sets. The sys­tem admin needs to enable them before use from Con­sole | Sys­tem Set­tings| Per­form­ance and Com­pat­ib­il­ity| Enable Auto Insights on Datasets.

It is import­ant to note that Auto Insights can also be enabled/disabled for indi­vidual data­sets. If the com­plex­ity of the data­set is caus­ing per­form­ance issues, then it’s bet­ter to turn off the fea­ture. This can be done by choos­ing the data­set, Actions Menu | Data­set | Inspect | Gen­eral | Enable Insights.

7. User and Role Man­age­ment Enhancements:

There is a new option to down­load mem­ber­ship data for users, groups, and applic­a­tion roles to a comma-sep­ar­ated val­ues (CSV) file. This data is use­ful for audit­ing pur­poses and also to find out exactly who has what access.

Each user, group or applic­a­tion role in Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Server can have dir­ect mem­bers or mem­ber­ships but they might also have one or more indir­ect mem­bers or mem­ber­ships. The list of the dir­ect and indir­ect mem­bers for a user, group or applic­a­tion role can be expor­ted to a CSV file for auditing.

This can be down­loaded from Dir­ect and Indir­ect Users | Groups | Applic­a­tion Roles | Export

8. Improved Sort Options:

Visu­al­isa­tions can now dis­play data sor­ted by mul­tiple dimen­sions and meas­ures. You can nar­row your focus to explore cer­tain aspects of your data by using advanced sort options. Here’s how:

• On the Home page, select a work­book, click on Actions Menu, and then select Open.
• Select a visu­al­isa­tion and click on Menu.
• Click on Sort By and then on Cus­tom.

• A dia­logue win­dow will open where you can define and arrange the sort order. Use it to con­fig­ure sorts, and clearly see the sort order and any sort conflicts.

• You can also sort an attrib­ute by a meas­ure column that isn’t used in the visualisation.

Below you can see how this fea­ture is used in vari­ous projects:

9. Change Set­tings for Mul­tiple Columns:

If you have mul­tiple columns that need to have their set­tings changed, there is no need to do it one by one like in a clas­sic ana­lysis editor.

Unfor­tu­nately, this not pos­sible in the Data view, although you can still alter a single column at a time there. How­ever, in the Metadata view, you can update the prop­er­ties of mul­tiple columns at the same time. Here’s how:

• From the Home page, open a data­set or a workbook.
• To update the prop­er­ties of mul­tiple columns at the same time, you need to click on the Metadata  icon from the tool­bar.
• Select mul­tiple data ele­ments to con­fig­ure and edit; the selec­ted data ele­ments are high­lighted and the first has arrows.

• To con­fig­ure the prop­erty, click on the arrow in the first ele­ment and then select the appro­pri­ate con­fig­ur­a­tion. For example, by click­ing on the arrow under Aggreg­a­tion you can set all of the meas­ure columns to Count Dis­tinct.
• The changes are not applied to cer­tain types of column.

10. Sys­tem Set­tings Enhancements:

With OAS 6.4 there is a new Sys­tem set­ting, Repeat Rows on Excel Exports for Tables and Pivots, which spe­cifies whether cells that span rows or columns are repeated when export­ing tables and pivot tables to Microsoft Excel.

This fea­ture allows a developer to spe­cify whether the cell in an Excel is repeated at row and column level when export­ing from a table or a pivot table, even though it is not spe­cified in the set­tings of the Ana­lysis editor.

By default, the Repeat rows are OFF in the settings.

Con­clu­sion

This new release really does justice to Oracle Ana­lyt­ics users, as a lot of the new fea­tures  show that Oracle has been listen­ing to its com­munity. Some fea­tures are bet­ter than oth­ers, but gen­er­ally this is a big release with a lot of use­ful func­tion­al­it­ies that make report­ing easier and the manip­u­la­tion of data more diverse.

This latest release shows that OAS is going in the right dir­ec­tion, and it has come a long way since its ini­tial release; neither is it trail­ing behind the com­pet­i­tion like Power BI and Tableau. Every release shows cool bits and pieces you would expect from a truly mod­ern BI report­ing tool!

Here at synvert we’ve got an exper­i­enced team of Oracle spe­cial­ists who are abreast with new devel­op­ments and con­tinue to innov­ate on top of them. So if you’ve got any ques­tions or needs, please don’t hes­it­ate to get in touch with us!