About Data Sources

You can connect to many types of data source, such as Cloud databases, on-premise databases, and many commonly used applications, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Amazon Hive.

You create a connection for each data source that you want to access in Oracle Analytics. Once connected, you can visualize your data to create insights.

A data source is any tabular structure. You see data source values after you load a file or send a query to a service that returns results.

A data source can contain any of the following:

• Match columns - These contain values that are found in the match column of another source, which relates this source to the other, for example, Customer ID or Product ID.
• Attribute columns - These contain text, dates, or numbers that are required individually and aren’t aggregated, for example, Year, Category Country, Type, or Name.
• Measure columns - These contain values that should be aggregated, for example, Revenue or Miles driven.

You can analyze a data source on its own, or you can analyze two or more data sources together, depending on what the data source contains. If you use multiple sources together, then at least one match column must exist in each source. The requirements for matching are:

• The sources contain common values, for example, Customer ID or Product ID.
• The match must be of the same data type, for example, number with number, date with date, or text with text.

When you save a workbook, the permissions are synchronized between the workbook and the external sources that it uses. If you share the workbook with other users, then the external sources are also shared with those same users.

Any data that you upload (as a dataset) is stored securely in Oracle Cloud.