Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud July 2024 Update Highlights

Wel­come to another edi­tion of our Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud (OAC) blog series! We are excited to share our impres­sions on the latest OAC July 2024 update.

In this art­icle, we will explore some of the new fea­tures intro­duced by Oracle in this latest edi­tion, which caters to the needs of both developers and busi­ness users. We’ll take you through the key enhance­ments across dif­fer­ent areas, present­ing deep insights into how these changes can improve your analytics.

Today we will only cover a few of the new fea­tures, but if you would like to see a detailed list of all the new fea­tures in this ver­sion, please click on this link.

Apply Con­di­tional Format­ting to Totals and Subtotals

As we already know, con­di­tional format­ting is a power­ful tool that allows us to high­light and cus­tom­ise data visu­al­isa­tions based on spe­cific rules. With this tool, we can auto­mat­ic­ally apply formats like col­ours, icons, and font styles to make the data clearer and more attract­ive. This fea­ture is a long-stand­ing ele­ment of OAC, and its key func­tions are dis­cussed in the fol­low­ing blog posts by our con­sult­ants:  Con­di­tional Format­ting and Rule Blend­ing, Con­di­tional Format­ting  and Oracle New Year Release.

In this July 2024 release, con­di­tional format­ting has been sig­ni­fic­antly improved in both tables and pivot tables, par­tic­u­larly when it comes to the visu­al­isa­tion of totals and subtotals.

To imple­ment this enhance­ment, we first need to select and con­fig­ure the table or pivot table where we want to imple­ment con­di­tional format­ting, then cre­ate the neces­sary rules for the data:

This can be done by click­ing on the Con­di­tional Format­ting icon loc­ated in the top right of our can­vas, then defin­ing a rule to high­light val­ues that exceed a spe­cific threshold:

To apply con­di­tional format­ting to the totals and sub­totals of a table, we first need to enable the visu­al­isa­tion of these val­ues. Start by select­ing the Prop­erty tab, then click on the Totals icon and enable the totals and sub­totals as shown below:

Once the totals and sub­totals are dis­played, apply the pre­vi­ously cre­ated con­di­tional format­ting rule to the table. Right-click on the table back­ground and select Con­di­tional Format­ting > Quant­ity Sold > Quant­ity Sold Rule (which is the rule you gen­er­ated), as illus­trated here:

Then, next to Totals, select the Val­ues (#) icon.

Once you have nav­ig­ated to the con­di­tional format­ting option, select Apply To. Two options will appear:

1. Apply to all data in the table.
2. Apply only to the totals/subtotals.

Choose the option that best suits your needs.

This fea­ture is use­ful for high­light­ing the most import­ant data, and the images below show two dif­fer­ent data visu­al­isa­tions based on the selec­ted options:

Data & Total & Subtotals:

Just Total & Sub­totals Selec­ted All:

As we can see, this new ver­sion of con­di­tional format­ting helps to improve the visu­al­isa­tion of our data.

Cre­ate Improved San­key Visualisations

A San­key dia­gram is a flow chart that visu­ally rep­res­ents the mag­nitude and dir­ec­tion of trans­fers between dif­fer­ent nodes within a system.

In this new release, the San­key chart prop­er­ties have been enhanced, so now, when cre­at­ing a new visu­al­isa­tion of this type, the default Node Height is set to Stretch, but you can change it to Con­dense. The default Stretch option allows for greater flex­ib­il­ity in graph visualisations.

Below you can see both Node Height visu­al­isa­tion options:

When the first option is selec­ted (Stretch, which you can find in the Prop­er­ties tab in the Gen­eral sec­tion), two more visu­al­isa­tion set­tings for the line flow appear:

• Node Gap: This set­ting allows you to change the width of the nodes and lines, increas­ing or decreas­ing them accord­ing to your needs.
• Line Trans­par­ency: This set­ting lets you adjust the opa­city of the lines in the graph.

You can also adjust the width of the nodes using the Node Width property:

Fur­ther­more, the pos­i­tion of the labels for each cat­egory can be mod­i­fied using the Data Label Pos­i­tion option, allow­ing us to place the label above, below, or in the middle of the nodes for greater clarity:

Cre­ate Pre­cise Rel­at­ive Time Work­book Filters

The July 2024 OAC update also intro­duces a use­ful func­tion­al­ity to apply time fil­ters to work­books. This new fea­ture allows you to dis­play data for a spe­cific period based on the cur­rent date or the end of the last period (such as the last month, year, etc.):

When expand­ing the fil­ter, a new option called Rel­at­ive Time appears, provid­ing sev­eral para­met­ers to adjust accord­ing to your requirements:

1. Type: This allows you to decide whether to select data from the past, future, or cur­rent day.
2. Incre­ment: This sets the period over which you want to move, like days, months, or years.
3. Time Level: This defines how you want to view that period (in years, months, days, etc.).
4. Rel­at­ive To: This offers the option to decide whether to dis­play data up to the cur­rent date or up to the end of the last period. For example, if Month is selec­ted as the Time Level and it is July, you can choose to include only data up to June, or also the days elapsed in July up to the cur­rent date.

This addi­tion is very use­ful as it allows for the flex­ible adjust­ment of data ana­lysis peri­ods, adapt­ing to changes in the cur­rent date or the end of spe­cific periods.

Deploy Vec­tor-Based Map Backgrounds

Thanks to this map enhance­ment, dif­fer­ent back­grounds can now be used, let­ting us change the default map back­ground (usu­ally white) as we wish. Now we can lever­age options like Google Satel­lite, Oracle Maps, and Oracle DataViz, amongst others.

To demon­strate how this improve­ment can be used in a work­book, we have taken a data­set with inform­a­tion on sales in dif­fer­ent states across the USA, and we will visu­al­ise this data with a map and add the fol­low­ing con­di­tion: if sales in a state exceed 75% of aver­age sales, the state will be shown in green, but if they fall below 50% of the aver­age, the state will be shown in red.

It looks like this:

Now it’s time to apply the new update: go to the Prop­er­ties tab loc­ated in the top left, as shown in the image below. Once there, click on the Map icon and then select the default Back­ground Map. From the options avail­able, we will select Oracle DataViz:

As you can see in the next image, the dif­fer­ent names of the states are shown on the map, col­oured accord­ing to the con­di­tion we set earlier. Moreover, with this back­ground map, the Default Map Type option appears, allow­ing us to change the map mode to bright, dark, or positron. Changes in the map zoom and the type of scale (kilo­metres or miles) can also be applied. This new fea­ture is use­ful to visu­al­ise and geo­graph­ic­ally loc­ate the data used more clearly (in our case, by state):

Con­clu­sion

Oracle has added a lot of con­tent ded­ic­ated to improv­ing the user and developer exper­i­ence. This blog post has focused on explain­ing new top­ics in explor­a­tion, dash­board­ing, and storytelling, emphas­ising the fea­tures that will be the most use­ful in our daily tasks. Focus­ing on improv­ing our data visu­al­isa­tions, this release lets us high­light the most rel­ev­ant data (like totals or sub­totals using con­di­tional format­ting) or add more con­text to the data in the graph­ics for a bet­ter under­stand­ing (like the map background).

How­ever, these are not the only new fea­tures intro­duced in July 2024. Other cru­cial aspects such as data con­nectiv­ity, mod­el­ling and pre­par­a­tion, aug­men­ted ana­lyt­ics and machine learn­ing, as well as per­form­ance, com­pli­ance, and admin­is­tra­tion have also seen sig­ni­fic­ant improve­ments, mak­ing for a more effi­cient and user-friendly plat­form and ensur­ing that OAC remains a reli­able plat­form for enabling intel­li­gent, data-driven decisions across all levels of an organisation.

Our team here at synvert is ready to sup­port you in explor­ing the full poten­tial of the latest OAC fea­tures. Con­nect with us today to unlock the full power of OAC and trans­form your ana­lyt­ics into a visual nar­rat­ive that brings your data to life!