Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service

For 2017 I thought I would start with something different. I recently spent some time working with the Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service ("DVCS" from here on out). I had seen a preview of this product before its release and thought it looked great and wanted to try it out.

DVCS is a presentation tool. You provide it the data, it makes sense of it and presents it. The data can come from Excel or various Oracle products. HFM isn't one of them, though.

For this test, I used some data from a recent wine tasting. Note the column headers will be helpful in working with the data later.

Click Data Sources and then click Create New Data Source to add the source (or in the case of Excel upload the file).

Once uploaded, return to Home and create a new VA Project. Once the data source is selected, the different fields can be clicked and dragged to the project - rows, columns, etc. The type of chart can be chosen and table layouts are available too for those who just want to see data.

With this setup below, I'm showing the tasters across the x axis for each wine and filtering the results (located above the bar chart selection) to taste. A score of 5 is good, 1 is bad.

With the above setup, we can see that Honig, Worthy, and Brookman were the leaders.

Changing the setup to a donut chart, removing the tasters, and changing the filter to total score, we can see that the Honig was the winner, with Brookman just beating Worthy for second.

Look at the bottom of the screenshot. Commentary can be added to provide context, etc. For the seven wines we tasted, 14 Hands Hot to Trot was not the best scoring wine, but for the price it provided (in our opinion) the best value.

There are other capabilities of DVCS: blending data (using more than one data source together [think joining tables]), calculations based on the data, multiple visualizations on one page, etc. But hopefully this gives you a good start to it. The Academy is a good starting point (as with all of the cloud offerings). This serves as a one-stop shop to docs and videos to get you started.

If you're able to sign up for a free trial, like I was, the product is worth a look. It also gives you some practice on how Academy and Console work which are applicable across many of the Oracle Cloud offerings. If the trial isn't available, or you just want something quick, then take a look at the videos.

http://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/data-visualization-cloud/data-viz-cloud_videos.htm