Wel­come back to our Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud (OAC) blog series for another insight­ful jour­ney through the realm of data empower­ment and innov­a­tion. We are thrilled to share the new May 2024 enhance­ments and updates with you, all of which reflect the con­tinu­ous and innov­at­ive efforts Oracle is invest­ing in this power­ful tool. You can also check out our last two update posts for Janu­ary and March 2024, to help you get a clearer idea of what has been going on in OAC this year.

Now let’s jump straight into what’s new in OAC – we’ve already explored and tested the most inter­est­ing fea­tures now avail­able, and we’d like to offer you our insights!

Using Para­met­ers to Auto­mate Fil­ters to Exclude Spe­cific Values

Oracle con­tin­ues increas­ing the cap­ab­il­it­ies of para­met­ers, and in this release there’s a new fea­ture that lever­ages them for fil­ter­ing pur­poses: we’ll walk you through it and its imple­ment­a­tion. In our pre­vi­ous posts, we tested and demon­strated other para­meter fea­tures,  like in our latest one about the March 2024 release.

In this new release, the use of para­met­ers for fil­ter­ing involves flip­ping the default fil­ter sec­tion from Include to Exclude. This enhance­ment allows for more effi­cient data man­age­ment across your entire dash­board, not just in indi­vidual visualisations.

To imple­ment this func­tion­al­ity, first nav­ig­ate to the work­book con­tain­ing the dash­board fil­ters and some com­mon fil­ter columns. Open one of the fil­ters and bind a para­meter to the selec­tion. The same para­meter is also bound to the column in the second workbook.

In the top right corner, you will see the option to switch the fil­ter from Include to Exclude. Select Exclude, then click on (x) to open the sub­menu for fur­ther configuration:

Secondly, at the bot­tom of the options, select Cre­ate Para­meter to bind the Exclude mode option on fil­ters to its para­meter. Think of it as gen­er­at­ing an object that you can drag and drop onto any fil­ter­ing option, which will rep­lic­ate the selec­tion you have set up here:

On the left-hand side of the para­meter tab, select Edit Para­meter, and you will notice that the para­meter bound to the Exclude option is a Boolean para­meter with two val­ues: ‘0’ indic­at­ing that the para­meter is off, and ‘1’, indic­at­ing that it is on:

This func­tion­al­ity can be used on other canvases or set as default for the entire dash­board. It will appear as an option whenever the source field is available.

Flex­ible Can­vas Dis­play Based on Breakpoints

In this release, the can­vas dis­play is designed to be flex­ible and respons­ive, adapt­ing seam­lessly to vari­ous screen sizes and res­ol­u­tions. This flex­ib­il­ity is achieved through Break­points, pre­defined screen widths at which the can­vas lay­out adjusts to provide an optimal view­ing experience.

By lever­aging these break­points, you can ensure that your visu­al­isa­tions and dash­boards remain access­ible and user-friendly across dif­fer­ent devices, whereas in pre­vi­ous OAC releases the auto-scale fea­ture primar­ily focused on mak­ing visu­al­isa­tions and text smal­ler without adjust­ing the over­all lay­out, often lead­ing to a dimin­ished user exper­i­ence on smal­ler screens as the visu­al­isa­tions became too small to read comfortably.

This new release also intro­duces enhanced screen respons­ive­ness to ensure an optimal view­ing exper­i­ence across vari­ous devices. First, open the dash­board in Author Mode, then nav­ig­ate to the bot­tom of the screen and turn on the newly added Respons­ive Can­vas Editor icon. Once activ­ated, a slider will appear at the top of the screen, allow­ing you to define the screen size and lay­out of the can­vas content:

Next, move the slider to define the screen size by cre­at­ing a break­point and reorder the visu­als to ensure they are eas­ily read­able. You can cre­ate mul­tiple break­points to accom­mod­ate vari­ous screen sizes.

To demon­strate this with an example, we will cre­ate two break­points and organ­ise the lay­out using com­mon dis­play sizes for tab­let and mobile.

The screen­shot below shows the adding of a break­point at a 750-pixel screen size and the reorder­ing of the visu­als to look bet­ter on a tab­let – tiles in two rows, with the scat­ter plot and heat­map one below the other, rather than side by side:

The next screen­shot shows the addi­tion of a break­point at a 500-pixel screen size and the reorder­ing of the visu­als to look bet­ter on mobile – tiles in two rows and the remain­ing graph­ical visu­als on top of each other. We can also align the fil­ter from a ver­tical to a hori­zontal dir­ec­tion for an enhanced view:

Below, you can see how the cre­ated can­vas works without and with breakpoint:

Inline List Dash­board Filter

The Inline List Dash­board Fil­ter type is a new fea­ture that enhances the OAC fil­ter­ing exper­i­ence. It allows users to select mul­tiple fil­ter val­ues dir­ectly from a list dis­played inline within the dash­board, mak­ing their applic­a­tion easier and more intu­it­ive. This is a fant­astic addi­tion, improv­ing the inter­activ­ity and user-friend­li­ness of your dash­boards, provid­ing a bet­ter over­all exper­i­ence when explor­ing and ana­lys­ing your data. The Inline List Fil­ter allows users to choose either a check­box or a radio but­ton, with the default option being a checkbox.

To use it, first open a dash­board, nav­ig­ate to the Dash­board Con­trols sec­tion, and cre­ate a Dash­board Fil­ter. Once cre­ated, drag the list of fields from the exist­ing data­set to the Fil­ter Con­trols sec­tion, then click on the Prop­er­ties icon and nav­ig­ate to Fil­ter Con­trols:

In the next step, set the fil­ter type to Inline List by expand­ing the fil­ter field, which will ini­tially render the fil­ter val­ues as check­boxes. You can modify this to dis­play fil­ter val­ues as radio but­tons by tog­gling the Multi-Select prop­erty from On to Off.

Addi­tion­ally, there are other prop­er­ties avail­able, such as another fil­ter. The Vis­ible Val­ues prop­erty is unique to the Inline List, allow­ing you to cus­tom­ise which val­ues are dis­played. This cus­tom­isa­tion can limit the dis­played val­ues, whilst the remain­ing val­ues can be accessed through scrolling:

In the fol­low­ing image, we have fol­lowed the same steps for each fil­ter field to show­case all three options:

Excel, CSV, and TSV File Fil­ter Improvements

Next, let’s explore a new approach to lever­aging data­set gen­er­a­tion dir­ectly on OAC. We’ll go through a scen­ario to high­light why gen­er­at­ing them from these types of files is a massive improvement!

Let’s ima­gine we have a file con­tain­ing inform­a­tion about mul­tiple cli­ents, and we need to gen­er­ate a dash­board for only one of them. It’s essen­tial to fil­ter this data before cre­at­ing the dash­board, to guar­an­tee that sens­it­ive inform­a­tion isn’t inad­vert­ently exposed while modi­fy­ing fil­ters within the dash­board. With this approach, we can do what we need without hav­ing to modify the ori­ginal file, thus main­tain­ing data integ­rity and privacy.

When gen­er­at­ing a new data­set, we can util­ise vari­ous sources, and one of the most com­mon sources for manual pro­cesses or ad hoc ana­lysis is an Excel-type file, such as a CSV (comma-sep­ar­ated val­ues) or TSV (tab-sep­ar­ated val­ues). Oracle has now intro­duced a new func­tion­al­ity that allows fil­ter­ing data dir­ectly on the Extrac­tion page, elim­in­at­ing the need to stage all the data and fil­ter it once on the canvas.

Now we can dive into the steps we need to fol­low. First, click on the Cre­ate Data­set but­ton loc­ated in the top right corner, then choose the source file type as either CSV or TSV, and open it. This action will take you to this page:

Now, there’s a handy option to apply fil­ters dir­ectly instead of manu­ally right-click­ing on the fields. This fea­ture allows you to lever­age spe­cific val­ues, expres­sions, and para­met­ers, essen­tially func­tion­ing as a one-off trans­form­a­tion and load fea­ture. It’s par­tic­u­larly use­ful when you only need a sub­set of the ori­ginal file without modi­fic­a­tions, or when lack­ing write or edit per­mis­sions. This enhance­ment sig­ni­fic­antly improves user exper­i­ence and makes the tool more intu­it­ive, espe­cially for new developers.

Addi­tion­ally, Oracle has intro­duced a fea­ture that enhances the abil­ity to export table or pivot table con­tent dir­ectly from visu­al­isa­tions embed­ded in another applic­a­tion or web page to Excel. This facil­it­ates the extrac­tion of data from OAC visu­al­isa­tions for fur­ther ana­lysis or report­ing in Excel, allow­ing users to work with their data out­side the OAC environment.

Other Fea­tures

OAC has also intro­duced sev­eral cut­ting-edge func­tion­al­it­ies for aug­men­ted ana­lyt­ics and machine learn­ing. These enhance­ments include face recog­ni­tion cap­ab­il­it­ies and PII (Per­sonal Inform­a­tion Iden­ti­fic­a­tion) data obfus­ca­tion within Data Flows. Although we haven’t covered these fea­tures extens­ively in our reg­u­lar Oracle update art­icles, they rep­res­ent a sig­ni­fic­ant advance­ment in integ­rat­ing AI-driven tools into OAC.

What’s more, there is a not­able update to the Con­sole con­cern­ing per­mis­sion set­tings: in the latest ver­sion, users can now set per­mis­sions at a finer gran­u­lar­ity for dif­fer­ent pages, elim­in­at­ing the need to grant broad, gen­eric per­mis­sions. This improve­ment enhances secur­ity by allow­ing for more pre­cise access con­trol. For example, users can grant access to the Virus Scan­ner without provid­ing per­mis­sion to modify con­nec­tions, sig­ni­fic­antly redu­cing the risks asso­ci­ated with overly broad permissions.

Con­clu­sion

In this Ana­lyt­ics Cloud release, Oracle has intro­duced some fea­tures and improve­ments that align with our own vis­ion for the product. The focus remains on lever­aging exist­ing assets and enhan­cing the UX for both developers and end-users. In this blog post we’ve high­lighted new para­meter usage, flex­ible can­vas scal­ing with break­points, and enhanced fil­ter­ing tools for dash­boards and data­sets. Oracle has added greater depth to the exist­ing tool­set whilst main­tain­ing the clear and simple data visu­al­isa­tion exper­i­ence their users expect.

We’re com­mit­ted to provid­ing reg­u­lar cov­er­age of Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud updates and other Oracle soft­ware top­ics through­out 2024 and bey­ond, so be sure to stay tuned to our blog for the latest insights.

Our team at ClearPeaks is here to sup­port you in explor­ing the full poten­tial of the latest OAC fea­tures. Whether you need a detailed walk­through of what’s new, guid­ance on apply­ing these fea­tures to your data, or simply have some ques­tions, our experts are ready to assist. Con­nect with us today to unleash the full power of OAC and trans­form your data ana­lyt­ics into cap­tiv­at­ing visual narratives!