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.

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