ORACLE DVD 12.2.2

ORACLE DVD 12.2.2

ORACLE DATA VISUALIZER DESKTOP (DVD) Installation

Oracle have recently released a desktop version of their Data Visualizer tool – which had until now just been a browser based tool available in an OBIEE 12c installation or the two BI Cloud or DV Cloud services.

The current version is 12.2.2 and is available from the following URL:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/oracle-data-visualization/index.html

Interestingly you get licences to use the desktop version along with licences/subscriptions for OBIEE12c or the two cloud servers, but can also license it individually – you don’t need to have the other products to use the desktop version, it can have its own data sources.

When you download it you get a single zip file, DVDesktop-12.2.2.0.0-win64.zip, which unzips to a single executable: DVDesktop-12.2.2.0.0-win64.exe

There is only a 64 bit version available – it does not appear to work on 32bit windows. In this blog I’m installing it on a Windows 10 laptop.

So to start the install simply run the executable. I right clicked on it and use the ‘Run as administrator’ option.

This invokes the standard Oracle installer:

Once the installation is finished, be aware of the message in the last screen, it says that the correct version of R and the set of packages need to be installed in order to be used with DVD for Advanced Analytics. Those can be installed via the “Install Advanced Analytics” file placed in Start Menu -> Programs -> Oracle.

This setup allows to chose the R installation location, installs R and then downloads from cran.us.r-project.org the relevant packages.

The desktop icon appears as:

Upon the first launch I got the following firewall alert:

 

This appears to be a run-time app for applications that use web-based technologies (HTML, Javascript etc.) If you want more information look at this link:

https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/

Once I allowed access I was in and was rather pleased to see just how similar it is to the web based version available with OBIEE12c & the cloud services:

 

A quick click on the sample project brought up the example:

 

To return to the home screen click on the three-bar drop down icon in the top left corner

From there the Data Sources link takes to straight to the screen to load data from a file, from a database or from ‘Oracle Applications’ – by which they mean an OBIEE 12c or Cloud service, from which you can download data directly from an existing analysis:

So there it is, a clean simple installation.

Data Sources

A lot of new data sources have been added to DVD, some of them still in beta phase. A bunch of new databases are now supported like Netezza, Amazon Aurora and PostgreSQL.

An interesting enhancement is the connection to Dropbox and Google Drive allowing DVD to source files stored in Cloud. Finally DVD’s exposure to Big Data world has been enhanced by the addition of the connectivity to tools such as Apache Drill, Presto and Cassandra.

Excel Editing

Excel sheets used as data source now can be edited and the DVD project refreshed without the need of manually reloading the spreadsheet.

Data Flows

There is a new component in DVD called Data Flow allowing the end user some basic transformations of the data like joining two datasets (even if coming from different sources), filtering, aggregating, adding columns based on custom formulas and storing the result on the local file system.

In the example below two files coming from Hive (but the source can also be different) are joined and a subset of columns is selected and stored locally.

Data Flows can be stored in DVD and re-executed upon request. The list of Data Flows is available under Data Sources -> Data Flows. In the next blog post I’ll show a typical Analyst use case in which Data Flow can help automating a series of data loading, cleansing and enriching steps.

Data Insights

Data Insights provides a way of quickly understand the dataset available, by default it shows a series of graphs, one for every attribute, with the cardinality of each attribute’s value. A drop down menu allows to show the same graphs based on any measure defined in the dataset.

BI Ask

The new DVD version contains also BI Ask, providing the ability to create queries with natural language which is automatically interpreted and presented in suggested visualisations.

As you could read in this post the new version of Data Visualization Desktop adds a series of really interesting features enabling not only the data visualisation but also data exploration and wrangling. In the next blog post we’ll see a typical DVD use case and how the new Data Flow option could be used to couple data coming from various sources.

New Visualisations

The first set of improvements in the new release is about the new out of the box visualisation, and new set of graphs is now available:

• List: Shows a list of the dimension’s values together with a gradient colouring based on the measure selected

• Parallel Coordinates: Shows multiple dimensions on the same chart enhancing the ability to quickly get an insight about possible connections between them

• Timeline: It’s an effective way of showing time related facts, each fact is shown along a timeline, with one or more distinguishing attributes, the example shows the quantity shipped by day and city.

• Network Diagrams: Chord, Circular, Network and Sankey Diagrams are used to shows inter-relationship between elements

Other visual enhancements include a multi-canvas layout that can be exported with a single click and a hierarchical or gradient colouring for the charts.