Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service - upload files

Within the Oracle Cloud portfolio Oracle has positioned the Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service as the tool to explore your data, visualize it and share your information with other people within the enterprise. The Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service can be used as a part of a data democratization strategy within an enterprise to provide all users access to data where and whenever they need it. The concept of data democratization is discussed in another blogpost on this blog.

Currently the Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service provides two main ways of getting data in the Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service. One is by connecting it to a oracle database source, for example located in the Oracle database cloud service, another is by uploading a file. Primarily CSV and XLSX files are supported for uploading data.

In most cases it is not a best practice to upload files as the data is relative static and is not connected to a live datasource as you would have with a database connection. However, in some cases it can be a good way to get data in. Examples are; users who add their own content and do not have the means to connect an Oracle database or relative static data.

Example data from DUO
In the example below we add a relative static piece of data to the Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service. This is a year over year report of people dropping out of schools in the Netherlands. The data is per year, per location and per education type and is freely available as open-data from the DUO website. You can locate the file for reference here.

Loading a data file
When a user wants to load data into the Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service the most easy way to do so from and end-user perspective is to use the GUI. Loading data includes a limited number of steps.

1) within the Data Sources section navigate to "Create" - " Data Source" Here you can select the type file by default. When selected you are presented with the option to select a file on your local file system.

2) the next step, after the file is uploaded, is to verify and if needed modify the definition of the uploaded data.

3) after this step is completed you will find the file ready for you use in your data sources as shown below.

In effect, those are the only actions needed by a user to add data to the Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service.