“Sunburst” Visualization using Oracle Data Visualization Desktop Tool
Target audience for this post – BI Developers, Data Analyst, Solution Architect, Data Visualizations Enthusiasts, Oracle team, anyone related to BI.
Pre-requisites – Get a bit hands-on on Oracle Data Visualization Desktop (Oracle DVD) tool and of course, get the tool installed. That’s it.
Hello Data Visualization Gurus – Today, I am going to write about the new visualization “Sunburst” introduced in Oracle Data Visualization Desktop tool. This visualization was missing in Oracle’s visualization tools for a long time and I had expecting been expecting them to introduce it anytime soon. However, I don’t see the “Sunburst” visualization option neither in OBIEE 12c (12.2.1.0.0) nor in Oracle BICS. (Apologies, if my observation is incorrect.) I am pretty optimistic that they would have plans to release it in their next release.
Not to take the credit out from Oracle, Oracle does have “Sunburst” feature as part of Oracle ADF, which requires a bit of coding.
Anyway, coming back to “Sunburst” feature in Oracle Data Visualization Desktop tool – this is quite an interesting chart in analyzing the hierarchical data. I look at it as an enhancement to the existing and highly used “Pie-Chart”. So in “Sunburst”, the hierarchical data is represented in series of circles. The inner most ring would represent the top level of the hierarchy and child levels in the consequent rings moving outward.
Let me quickly demonstrate how to create a “Sunburst” visualization using Oracle Data Visualization Desktop tool.
Step 1: Get your hierarchical data ready. In my case, I am going to use a simple spreadsheet (image shown below) showing sales data by period of time & product category.
Step 2: Quickly create a new VA (Visual Analyzer) project.
Step 3: Select the data source. In my case, it is “Sales data”.
Step 4: Add new visualization and change it to “Sunburst”. Also, notice on the left side that Subject Area or the spreadsheet columns are available for use to create the report.
Step 5: This is going to be the final step. Drag and drop the “Sales” measure to “Values(Y-Axis) and “Quarter”, “Month” & “Week”(in the same order) attributes under “Color”.
See how easy it was to create a “Sunburst” visualization using the tool. I feel this is a great addition and it allows you to quickly analyze the data by looking at the color & size of the circle (or semi-circle).
Also, when you click on a hierarchy level, the tool automatically highlights the relevant levels by adding a black border on the circles, which makes it easier to analyze the data. See the screenshot below.
My top 3 observations about the feature –
- All in all, “Sunburst” is a great addition to the Oracle’s Data Visualization stack and hope to see it soon in OBIEE 12c & Oracle BICS as well.
- Can be used as an alternative to “Treemap” visualization, which represents hierarchical data in rectangular format.
- Easy to develop, if you have proper hierarchy in place.
There are few more new/additional chart options available with Oracle DVD like Scatter (Cat.), Stacked Scatter (Cat.), Donut, Radar Bar, Tag cloud, etc. Will try to cover them in my upcoming posts.
Until then, play around with the tool & explore the features.
Any questions, please ask.
