Recent Posts by Philippe Lions

Being able to calculate period-to-period growth and growth rates is a common need in most analytics insight projects today. Oracle Analytics Cloud provides a robust semantic layer capability to do this with the Oracle Analytics metadata repository, where time hierarchies and rich time series calculations can be defined and modeled. Often in a self-service analytics context, we quickly upload a file-based dataset and don't take the time to model a metadata layer on it. We...

What would you say if I told you that advanced data analysis can be as easy as the right-click of a mouse? Preposterous? Impossible? Oracle Analytics Cloud offers a user-friendly method to leverage advanced analytics functions on a chart with a single mouse click. Having advanced analytical functions like forecast, cluster, and outliers provides a strong capability to business users who want to have better insights into their data. Supporting advanced analytics functions with a...

How would you like to know what your software users are thinking and how they might react in the future? Oracle Analytics Cloud supports the accumulation of Usage Tracking (UT) statistics that help in monitoring system usage and performance to understand and predict user behavior. Knowing in advance what choices a user is likely to make helps increase efficiency and reduce errors.These statistics can be used in a variety of ways such as in system or database optimization,...

Building a report or dashboard can be easy when the data comes from a simple spreadsheet and there are a limited range of simple queries. But what happens when your data collection comes from multiple sources and you want to identify very complex concepts? You are better off using software with a data aggregation rule that can handle the job. Oracle Analytics Cloud data visualization feature supports different aggregation rules for any metric like "sum," "average," "minimum,"...

Oracle Analytics Cloud offers the ability to create data flows and perform incremental loads on a target table. Data flows can operate only on the incremental data which becomes available in the source in between the current run and the previous run. In this blog, let's see how to perform an incremental load on a database table. The video below walks you through the configuration process and how you can define a method of continuing data processing from the last processed...

The biggest extravaganza in the world of cricket—the ICC Cricket World Cup—is upon us. The tournament is one of the world's most viewed sporting events and is considered the "flagship event of the international cricket calendar" by the International Cricket Council. This is the 12th edition of the Cricket World Cup scheduled to be hosted by England and Wales. For those not familiar with the game, cricket is played on a large field (or pitch) with a running area bound on either...

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 instance? From your mobile, right away, in just a few seconds? Oracle Synopsis can help. Synopsis is an app that provides actionable insights for smart decision making at your fingertips. It now directly connects to any dataset lying on your Oracle Analytics Cloud instance and immediately creates meaningful analytics for you. It lets you...

When comparing data in a visualization, it's necessary to interchange datasets quickly, and easily to get a series of choices to act on. A new feature in the latest version of Oracle Analytics Cloud, called replace dataset, allows users to intelligently apply (or map) data visualization analyses created using one dataset on to another dataset with only a few clicks and intuitive column mapping.The data visualization feature in Oracle Analytics allows users to create in-depth...

In business decision making, knowing when to strike while the iron is hot may require knowing where things are hot and where they are not. Let's say you are an operations head of a chain of multi-brand retail stores, and you are trying to visualize and identify areas with highest population density or with highest economic activity to open new stores. In this scenario, a heatmap could prove extremely useful. What is a heatmap? A heatmap is a graphical representation of data...