OAC - New Interface

At ODTUG Kscope18, Oracle has revealed new features and groundbreaking updates that are going to come in the next release in OAC. Have you ever wondered what it's going to be

I was so excited that I kicked-off the promotional offer and fired up my OAC instance. But, I was surprised and felt sad after looking at the instance that is in public cloud and the instance that is going to come in the next release. Not sure if I am missing anything here which will enable me to access the newer interface / newer instance

The new interface looks sleek and looks a lot better than the previous interface. I am using the instance as parts of Hands-On lab at ODTUG Kscope18. Not sure till when this environment will be available. I will update this blog and make it more comparitive with what is available right now in public cloud

New JET UI. I don't know if that is the right way to call it but that's what it says when you fire up the OAC instance new interface

Less clutter and way better. When you click on actions at a database level, you would notice two new items. "Inspect" and "Analyze"
"Inspect" gives information about your database. The most important being the audit trail, statistics, partitions, filters and many more

What I really liked is the ability to execute the MDX scripts. With the ability to perform calculations using MDX INSERT and export the data using MDX EXPORT, it really makes sense to execute the MDX script.

"Analyze" on the other hand can be considered as smartview lite. You would have understood it by looking at the error message that popped up below.

This is not a fully functional SmartView and can be considered as a lite version to do some basic testing and also the ability to execute MDX scripts. If you are on Mac and doesn't want to install SmartView, this could be one way. However, it was announced at Kscope18 that office 365 will be supported for SmartView. This is really a very good news.

 If you look at Jobs, the type of jobs that you can execute has been expanded. You have the ability to run MDX script, Groovy script (this is new), ability to build and clear aggregations. Take a look at the list below

I have to explore more on "Run Groovy" and where that would be applicable. I believe this is the first time Groovy has been added to Essbase. Till now, Groovy has only been permitted to Planning cloud

Now let's look at files. Files could be anything from outline (otl), calc scripts (csc), report scripts, maxl scripts, mdx scripts, grrovy scripts, text files (csv, txt)
I believe some of the extension of these file depends on the type of application that you are trying to build.

There are two ways that you can upload the files to an OAC.

• You can upload it at an APP/DB level by navigating yourself from "Inspect" > Click "Files" tab > "Upload files" and select the files that you would want to upload
• Another way is to click on "Files" at the top and upload the files from there. I would prefer this was as this gives more control of where I can upload the files to. You would notice that there is a folder called "Gallery" and you can probably upload templates for a reference and use them later

Note of Caution
Remember that these features are not live yet and it may change from the time I am writing this to actually when it will be available for you to patch up to be able to see all these neat features

Now, let's take a look at one example. Below is the main screen. We will focus only on the applications for now

Navigate to applications folder and navigate down till the database level. "Upload Files" will let you upload files. When you selct the files, wait for it to show as per the below screen and then proceed further. It will come up with X mark if the format is not supported. Only the supported format gets uploaded. I am still trying to figure out the format for groovy scripts

You would see below screen after the files are uploaded

Have you noticed the file type? Maxl, MDX, Groovy. Isn't it amazing!!! I really love it...

Things I felt would have been better

• There is no way to cancel. Once you click "Close", the files get uploaded
• If the file already exist, it will show X mark and doesn't upload
• If you want to delete any files, you have to do it manually. There is no way that you can select multiple files and delete

I wish all the above would change eventually go away

In the next blog posts, I will try to migrate the application I used for my kscope18 presentation in to OAC and see how things would work out. I am going to look at more use cases of MDX and how they can be used to become a standard langague in OAC