Where is the log for my Data-Flow ?

Have you ever wondered exactly what is happening when you execute your Oracle Analytics data flow ? How can you see the exact log of actions triggered by the dataflow you just executed ?

Most of us rely only on the system confirmation that an OAC data-flow ran successfully along with the creation of a refreshed data set. But what if it fails ? What if, the user is interested in know what exactly happened in the underlying Database source, and what was retrieved in the OAC engine ?

                     







In our example scenario we need to track the logs of a data-flow we just built. The logs exists in the OAC server, but we don't know how to easily find them. A simple trick to help identify which log is the right one, is to mark our data-flow with a searchable marker. That can be done by adding a new column with a unique name in the data-flow. In this screenshot below, we are adding a column named 'TIP33' for example:







 
Now lets see what happened….

A data-flow fires a set of 'logical SQL' commands to the Oracle Analytics server, just like any other data-viz query do, and hence generates various logs behind the scenes that can be visited to track what exactly happened when it was run. But how to find the right log... Here is a simple pragmatic trick to allow users a peak behind the scenes and do this is quick and simple.

Note that this addition to the data-flow will have no adverse effect on the resulting data. Let's just save the dataflow and re-run it now

Let's open OAC Console and navigate to Session and Query Cache

Here we can see the server output of any activity within the OAC Server. To find the most recent queries pertaining to our Data-flow run lets just search the page for TIP33.

This highlights entries in the log that pertain to our Data Flow. By looking up the logs, physical SQLs, # of rows returned, and potentially error messages, Users can now see what executed when the dataflow was run…… we can now rapidly fine tune our dataflows designs to optimize them !

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