Synchronize Your Analytics with Date-Driven Enrichments in Oracle Analytics

Synchronize Your Analytics with Date-Driven Enrichments in Oracle Analytics

Enhancing datasets with meaningful context is crucial for insightful analytics. One of the powerful ways to achieve this in Oracle Analytics is by leveraging Custom Knowledge with date keys. This article describes how you can effortlessly incorporate relevant business-specific time frames—like fiscal periods, holidays, or even weather data—directly into your analytics workflow.

Introducing Custom Knowledge with Date Keys

Imagine you're working with sales data but need to analyze it using your company's fiscal calendar instead of the standard Gregorian calendar. Previously, you'd have to manually map these dates—a cumbersome and error-prone process. But with Custom Knowledge in Oracle Analytics, you can seamlessly integrate your unique date-based information and enrich datasets automatically.

Let's dive right in. This example uses a fiscal calendar that runs from June 1 to May 31.

1. Create a Custom Knowledge set and name it, for example "Fiscal Calendar."
2. The first column should be your date key at a day-level granularity.
3. The columns to the right are attributes specific to your fiscal calendar, such as Fiscal Year, Fiscal Quarter, Fiscal Month, etc.

For detailed instructions on how to create Custom Knowledge in Oracle Analytics, see the documentation.

Once the Custom Knowledge with date keys is created, these attributes become instantly available as enrichment recommendations across datasets and workbooks. Oracle Analytics automatically recognizes these date keys during dataset profiling, significantly simplifying your workflow.

Applying Custom Knowledge in Your Datasets

Next, let’s see how Custom Knowledge enriches a dataset. The process is to create a dataset with the file or database table of your choosing, for instance "Video Game Sales." This dataset contains two important date columns: Order Date and Ship Date.

Because our Fiscal Calendar custom knowledge was previously defined, Oracle Analytics automatically identifies and matches these date columns during semantic profiling. It immediately suggests enrichments based on our Custom Knowledge set, such as Fiscal Year, Quarter, and Month, without additional configuration.

Leveraging Smart Enrichments and Recommendations

The Recommendation Engine kicks in, presenting the Custom Knowledge enrichments for easy integration:

• Fiscal Year
• Fiscal Quarter
• Fiscal Month
• Fiscal Week
• Last Day of Month

These enrichments now align seamlessly with our original dataset, significantly reducing manual setup and ensuring accuracy.

Creating Intuitive Visualizations

Now comes the exciting part—building a visualization. When you create a workbook based on your enriched dataset, you'll notice the newly added fiscal calendar attributes also appear as real time enrichments for each date.

To create a quick and insightful visualization using the enrichments: 

1. Drag "Fiscal Quarter" directly onto the canvas.
2. Add a measure such as "Sales."
3. Optionally, enrich it further with "Fiscal Year" to provide additional context or segmentation.

In mere seconds, you have a clear, intuitive visualization that breaks down sales performance by fiscal quarters and years. No manual date transformations or complex calculations are required!

Exploring More Possibilities with Date Key Enrichments

Beyond fiscal calendars, Date Key enrichments unlock a wide array of analytical possibilities:

• Holidays: Analyze sales spikes or traffic patterns around major holidays, allowing better planning for marketing and inventory management.
• Weather data: Correlate historical weather patterns with sales or attendance data to improve forecasting accuracy or staffing efficiency.
• Industry-specific events: Integrate events such as sports seasons, trade shows, or promotional periods to gain deeper insights into seasonal impacts on business performance.

Tips and Tricks when Working with Enrichments

• Pre-existing datasets - If a dataset was created before the Custom Knowledge was added, you’ll need to refresh the profile results to apply the new date-driven enrichments. The dataset author can do this by opening the dataset and clicking Reprofile in the Transformation Editor.

• Data flow datasets - When working with datasets that are created as a result of a data flow, the dataset author must display the dataset’s inspector screen and select Enable Knowledge Enrichments for those datasets. This allows the date-driven enrichments to display in your workbooks under the Data Elements Tree.

• Working with multiple date key enrichments - When you need to go beyond fiscal periods and want to add date key enrichments such as holidays, weather data, or industry specific events, you must use the same Custom Knowledge file for all the enrichments. For example, the following spreadsheet shows an example of Custom Knowledge with fiscal periods plus holidays and industry specific events in the same file.  

Call to Action

The ability to use date keys within Custom Knowledge is more than a convenience; it’s a significant step toward intuitive and insightful analytics. By effortlessly integrating your business-specific contexts directly into your data workflows, you can spend more time analyzing insights rather than wrangling dates.

Oracle Analytics continues to streamline complex tasks, empowering analysts and business users alike. Go ahead and give Custom Knowledge with Date Keys a try; we're confident you'll see immediate value.

Happy analyzing!