Synopsis Mobile Application sourcing from Oracle Analytics Cloud

Have you ever felt the need for a rapid, automatic overview of any of the datasets that are available to you on your Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) instance ? From your mobile, right away, over few seconds ?

Oracle Synopsis Application now directly connects to any dataset lying on your OAC instance and immediately creates meaningful analytics out of it. It lets you interact with spreadsheets and business data in a visual and intuitive way—while you're on the go, on your mobile, within seconds.No technical training required, no specific Skills required, the app installs and connects in seconds. 

This 6 minutes video gives a sense of the whole experience. The blog below shares a few more details as well.

Synopsis is available on both Android and iOS devices. At the time we are writing this blog (Feb 2019), the one for Android is a little ahead as it lets you connect to Oracle analytics cloud. The same feature in iOS would be available in few weeks with an upcoming update.

How to connect to Oracle Analytics Cloud using Synopsis

From your Synopsis App, tap the + icon in green to get an option to connect to OAC. Provide the server details and credentials to connect to OAC. Once connected, you will see a list of all the files which are available inside of OAC. Click on a spreadsheet from all the choices you have and let it run some background analysis before rendering the first visuals.

The first visuals

After a bit of background analysis, the first visuals are rendered. The top row on the screen shows 3 attribute columns that you can toggle, the bottom of the screen has 3 metrics suggested from the datasource you analyzed. Clicking on each would display a metric by attribute pair. In the screenshot you see "Profit by Order Priority"

Performance tiles of all metrics

If you wish to see the the metrics available in the datasource, simply click on "OAC". Against each tile, there are options to choose the right aggregation you want.

Choose/Edit the right columns for analysis

Click on the settings icon in the top pane to get to a screen where you can delete, move columns from metrics to attributes and rename columns. Hold on a column until a strike through appears to make sure the column is unselected. Hold and drag columns from Numbers area to Text area. Dragging columns from Text to Numbers makes them as metrics. Turn on the "Edit Column Labels" using which you can edit the column names

Further Analysis

By now I am sure you are wishing to do more with Synopsis. Lets say if you wish to analyze each metric by all the attributes available, click on a performance tile say "Sales". In this screen you will see various analysis of Sales by all the attributes. 

If you wish to edit the visualizations, click on one of them where it takes you to an edit screen. In the edit mode, you would be able to change the chart type, add/remove metrics and attributes, filter the chart based on attributes. 

Statistical Analysis

Once you are in the edit mode of a chart, you can choose to get some statistical information like mean min, max etc, by clicking on the yellow colored "i" icon just above the edit pencil icon

Natural Language Generation - Project Insights

Clicking on the button show in the image here would generate some interesting insights in the data. Things like "If a metric value goes down, then another metric goes up" would be generated by the built in analytics engine.

By editing out a metric or an attribute, the insights automatically run to provide fresh project insights with the new metrics and attributes.

Sharing the report on Social media

Reports and visuals generated on Synopsis can be shared on various media options like Whats app, email, Twitter etc. Click on the share icon on top of each report to share the particular visual.

By now you would have realized that so many functionalities can be accomplished using Synopsis. To conclude Synopsis is an app that provides actionable insights for smart decision making at your finger tips. Soon, you would be able to connect to Oracle cloud sources and leverage the same capabilities on other sources with Synopsis

Are you an Oracle Analytics customer or user?

We want to hear your story!

Please voice your experience and provide feedback with a quick product review for Oracle Analytics Cloud!

 

Jan 2019: What's new in Oracle Analytics Cloud 105.1.0

Oracle Analytics Cloud - Release 105.1.0 – January 2019 offers several new Administration features and enhancements to improve your overall product Lifecycle experience.

New Features

Admin Related : 

• Snapshot Enhancements : users have a fine control over the type of content to include in a Snapshot, and the scope of this content has widely increased since last release. While creating a Snapshot, user either chooses 'Everything' which takes a backup of the entire environment or uses the 'Custom' option to selectively pick specific content to back up or migrate. File-based datasets, custom visualizations plug-ins and extensions are available as options to select. Similar options are available while restoring Snapshots : users can choose to restore all the contents from the Snapshot or selectively restore only a few types of objects during restore. These enhancements improve the overall backup, restore, and migration experience from environments to environments.

• Data file migration utility: This utility complements the Snapshot process for cases when connection between the source and target environments may not have access to the same back-end Cloud infrastructure. Such situations can interrupt migration of some file-based data sets included in the snapshots. This utility provides an alternative way to directly migrate data files from one environment to another in these cases.

• Configure System Settings and Restart : OAC Service Administration now offers an option within Console screen to edit the configuration of the environment server. Clicking on the 'Configure System Settings' tile in the console screen launches the OAC Environment Manager which allows to override several system settings like
• ‘Allow HTML content’,
• ‘Currency preferences’,
• ‘Prompt autocomplete’ options,
• ‘Timezone settings’,
• ‘Default scrolling behavior’,
• Evaluate support level’, 
• etc….

Once settings are edited, services can be restarted by a click from the same interface so they are taken into effect. Respective services that need to be restarted (OBI Server, OBI Presentation Server...) are automatically identified and selected in the Restart pop up. The user only needs to click OK to restart those services.

• Catalog Manager : Catalog Manager utility is now available as part of OAC client install and connects to online OAC services. Using the catalog manager, Administrators can connect to an OAC instance and directly manage Web Catalog. Edit permissions on catalog objects, move objects from folder to another, create a report on catalog objects and save it locally etc…

• DSS/Data Prep Public Rest APIs : Several Data Set Service REST end points can be called from UNIX curl command, POSTMAN, swagger UI console etc. Using these APIs, developers can perform operations like list all connections on OAC environment, create/update/delete connections, replace/delete datasets, create/update/delete dataflows etc... These APIs open several powerful capabilities to the developer community in leveraging OAC capabilities.

Data Source & Data Visualization Enhancements:

• Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing: A data source connector to Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is now available. Connection to both Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing as well Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud are made easier now as the Create Connection screen directly accepts the zipped wallet file for credentials. Simply drag and drop the zip file and all the back end details will be automatically identified for the connection : host server name and port number are automatically identified and list of service names are available for selection as a drop down thereby eliminating the previous manual entry process.

• New Table Viz properties: new properties have been introduced in the Table visualization. 
• Suppress Repeating Values:  This can be toggled on/off (default off) and controls if values are repeated or not in a Table visualization.
• Show Duplicate Rows: This can toggled on/off (default off). When set to Off, the metric values displayed in the Table are aggregated using the aggregation rule of the metric. When set to On, Table displays the granular level of the dataset without applying any aggregation on the metric.

Pixel Perfect Reporting (BI Publisher) Enhancements:

• POV (Point Of View) parameter in an MDX query:  POV as parameter was introduced in the previous release and is improved in 5.1 release. User can now search a dimension in a cube and include a POV parameter value in an MDX query. Similar to SQL query, when including a parameter in MDX query, it will automatically create List of Values and parameter prompt in the data model. Users will get prompted to complete the POV anytime they consume or design a report using this datasource.

• Snapshot includes pixel perfect reporting: Snapshot files now include BIP related objects: credentials, configurations, and scheduled jobs of pixel-perfect reporting. That allows to easily migrate content from one environment to another using snapshots.

Are you an Oracle Analytics customer or user?

We want to hear your story!

Please voice your experience and provide feedback with a quick product review for Oracle Analytics Cloud!