OAC - The first patch

The honeymoon is over. Well not for my Boss, Edward Roske, he got married in Paris last week. So for him it is just starting. Congratulations Edward. For us using OAC, it is over because the first patch has arrived. It is not a virgin version any more.  That is a good thing for us.  While a lot of things in the patch were talked about at KScope as “coming soon” and was put in to the “Look Smarter than you are with Oracle Analytics Cloud” book, I feel it is good to go over what was released in the patch on 7/29/2017. The version is 17. Interestingly enough, one thing that did not work was getting the readme for the update.

There are a number of enhancements in this release. First, we can now see the logs generated without having to FTP onto the server and search for them. If you are at the Server level (having not selected an application or database) Select Administration and you will see the logs structure.

A couple of things to note.

1. You can only download the logs, they re not interactive on the screen

2. It is best to use something like Notepad ++ to view the output. Since this comes from a Linux box, notepad does not put display it well.

 

Second, A Rules file editor has been added so you can maintain and create rules files. When you select a database, you can go into the scripts card and click on the second 

"Tab"

 

Once there, we can create a new rule or edit an existing one.

 

Currently, you can't see the data like you can in EAS, but this is much better than the JSON editor shipped in the initial release (Although, I wish they kept that as an option as in some cases it would be nice)

 

Next, a UI has been added for creating transparent partitions.  I believe they are working on replicated partitions, but don't quote me on that.

In addition, you can now export Data and calc scripts from the UI

 

And here is what it looks like in the exported DBX file in excel. Notice if the file is over 1 meg, it saves it to a file instead.

 

 

another change to the UI is you can now set Location Aliases for using XRef (which also means you can use XRef)

 

Non-UI changes include:

• The ability to use MaxL files in EssCLI (there will be a whole blog post on this)
• Application timeout settings. If an application is idle for 15 minutes it will stop. In the future this is supposed to be configurable. (for 3 minutes to 2 weeks)
• A new Sub-select for MDX in BSO (yes I said BSO) cubes.  The information I got is that it can be sued as a filter mechanism to reduce processing that requires partial aggregation. I've not had a change to delve into this further or see the benefits or ramifications. Once I do I'll talk about it.
• Finally CalcLockBlock has been deprecated in this release. 

BUT wait, it you buy into this now, you also get at no additional charge, updates to the Cube Designer extension in Smart View. Alas, I don't have screen shots as I haven't had time to download the latest version but the improvements include:

• Admin capabilities -> Delete App/Cube
• Search Capability in Hierarchy viewer
• Support for Generation Names
• Support for asynchronous jobs
• File Options - Setting the file delimiter, Skip Rows and Ignore Columns
• Flip the sign for members on load (selecting the dimension and UDA)
• Support for Text Lists 

While I'm sure there are bug fixes as well, (I know the corrected a problem with CDFs) until I get the actual readme, I'm not sure what fixed..
I expect the next release will occur soon, and when it does I'll blog about some other cool features that are supposed to be in it.