Updates to Oracle Analytics Cloud, Oracle BIEE 12c and Oracle DV Desktop

Late last year I covered one of the first releases of Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) on this blog covering the v3 release of OAC; since then the product has had a major UI refresh with OAC v4 and so I thought it’d be worth covering this new release along with updates to OBIEE12c and DV Desktop in a follow-up to last year’s post.

OAC’s original look and feel was based on OBIEE12c v1 that itself contained the first iteration of Oracle Data Visualisation (DV) and whilst the new modern flat UI that release introduced was an improvement on the 11g release before it since then Oracle have rapidly iterated with Oracle DV Desktop and DV Cloud Service and the UI from those products is now the primary user interface for Oracle Analytics Cloud v4.

If you’ve not used Oracle Analytics since the OAC v3 and the initial OBIEE12c versions you’ll be surprised how much the user experience has changed since then; when OBIEE12c first came out most of us still considered Answers and Dashboards to be the primary reporting UI with the BI Repository being the central carefully governed and dimensionally-modelled source of all reporting data.

Since then the world has moved-on and analytics is now all about empowering the end-user through self-service, easy-to-use tools that enable you to do most tasks without having to involve the IT department or do lots of up-front data modeling and data onboarding. Oracle DV Desktop started meeting this need by introducing basic data preparation features into the product so users could upload spreadsheets and other other data and do some basic formatting and tidying before analyzing it on their desktop, and those data upload and preparation features are now available for OAC users in the v4 release. To upload a spreadsheet file into OAC you now just drop it onto the web page and you’re then given a preview and the option to upload its contents to the analytics instance.

After that you can trim, split, derive and change the datatypes of data you upload so that it works in the most optimal way with the analysis features of the product, for example by turning dates in string formats not recognized by Oracle DV into proper date datatypes that can then be used in time-series analysis.

For data transformation needs that go beyond basic formatting and datatype changes you can now build ETL-style routines that filter, aggregate, transform and add external datasets all using simple point-and-click user tools, and if you’ve licensed the new OAC Data Lake Edition these transformations then extend to include model training, forecasting and sentiment analysis. In the example below I’m using OAC Data Lake Edition to forecast weight forward from a set of smart scale readings that’s then executed at the BI Server level using Python maths and statistics libraries.

I’ll actually be talking about OAC Data Lake Edition in my presentation at ODTUG KScope’18 at Walt Disney World Florida this June, where I’ll cover some of these extended data flow features along with Oracle Big Data Cloud and Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service in my session “BI Developer to Data Engineer with Oracle Analytics Cloud Data Lake Edition”.

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Cloud of course is great but not every Oracle Analytics customers has made the move yet, or like myself you might have a cloud instance you can spin-up as-and-when you need it but then use regular on-premises OBIEE12c in a VM for your day-to-day learning and experimentation.

With Oracle’s cloud-first strategy and focus on Oracle DV as the main innovation path for analytics features this meant that my OBIEE12c instance running in a Google Compute Engine VM was starting to lag behind OAC v4 and DV Desktop in-terms of look-and-feel and all of these new features, and so I was pleased to note the other day that the 12.2.1.4.0 (aka v4) release of OBIEE12c is now available for download on OTN that includes many of the features currently available in OAC v4 and DV Desktop (but not the advanced data flow features in OAC Data Lake Edition, for example)

Oracle Data Visualization Desktop has also been updated recently to connect to Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud and I’ll be covering that new capability in a blog post in the near future; but more importantly for me at least….

… it also now supports Mac OS X 10.13 High Sierra, great news for us Mac users who had to stop using DV Desktop on our laptops late last year when that most recent update to OS X came out but DV Desktop didn’t yet support it.

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