Product Release Notes

3.1

December 11, 2017

Platform

New Features:

  1. Data Center:
    • The following API connectors are integrated into the BDB Platform:
    1. LinkedIn
    2. Google Sheet
    3. Facebook
    4. MailChimp
    5. Flipkart
    6. Amazon
    7. Zendesk
    8. Dropbox
    9. ZOHO Books
    10. Quick Books

Enhancements:

  1. Users can now select the shared folders/documents as a preferred choice using the ‘Shared’ option in the ‘Preferences’ section.
  2. User Management: The Viewer Role group can be hidden across the platform while performing the following tasks:
    1. To share any Data Connection/ Data Set/ Data Store, Document.
    2. To assign users to a user group.
  3. Play-
    1. The ‘Export’ option has been added to the Play plugin to export the created plays in PDF and PPT
    2. . The gallery images can be shared with other users via the ‘Share With’ option.
Note:

API Data Connectors and Play Plugin are currently in Beta.

Business Story

Enhancements:

  1. NLP Enhancements: Interactive UI is provided to the ‘Data Search Bar.’
  2. Mobile App: Mobile Responsive Design- The app header can be hidden in the mobile version of the Business Story.

Data Preparation

New Features:

  1. The MySQL writer has been added as an output resource.
  2. The Google Sheets has been added as an input source.

Enhancements:

  1. The workflow components reflect autonumbering suggestions if ambiguity occurs in a column's name
  2. A notification message has been displayed to assure success or failure of a workflow.
  3. Performance improvement for the ‘LoadAllWorkspaces’ function.
Note:
  1. Extract
    1. The present release supports only RDBMS data sets and Google Sheets as input sources.
    2. The current implementation of Incremental Load in BizViz requires Cassandra to work. This limitation will be removed in a future release.
  2. Load
    1. The present release supports only elastic search server and MySQL writer as output data sink. More output choices will be offered in future versions.
    2. The current implementation of Incremental Load in BizViz requires Cassandra to work. This limitation will be removed in a future release.

Dashboard Designer

Charting

New Features:

  1. Data Grids
    1. Micro Charts such as Percent Progress Slider, Sparkline, Pie, Bullet are added.
    2. Column types such as Numeric/String/Image/Hyperlink/Sparkline are introduced.

Enhancements:

  1. Data Grids:
    1. Columns can have the option to enable tooltip.
    2. The Comparison indicators are updated to reflect pre-defined alert shape types and colors.
    3. Users can enable the ‘Frozen Column’ option to define the column width and make them horizontally auto-scrollable.
    4. It supports comma separated data in a column with/without indicator
    5. The sorting option is controlled by a dataset property.
  2. Charts:
    1. The following updates are provided for all the charting components:
      • The ‘Max’ button appears at the top right corner while resizing the window
      • The chart property positions (E.g., Axis Label, Title, etc.) can be controlled through an SDK script.
      • The cursor pointer shape changes to hand icon while hovering it over a drillable value.
    2. X-Axis can be highlighted for "0th" value marker when plotting the negative values
    3. Line types can be set as Straight, Dotted and Dashed for charts.
    4. Formatter: Currency formatters (such as $) should be placed after the negative sign (-)
    5. Export Excel: Numeric values should be exported as numbers in excel.
    6. Bar Chart: Stacks drawing should be top to bottom.
    7. Group Bar Chart: The data is displayed from top to bottom.
    8. . Treemap Chart: Number formatted data can be supported.
    9. Data Labels: Number formatters and better alignment of labels
    10. Radio Filter: should pass its Label and Value into drill object.
    11. Scatter Plot Chart: The Dataset palette has advanced properties section to configure display name of Other-Field, Color-Field, and Radius-Field.
    12. Bubble Chart: Range indicator workflow should be same as plot chart
    13. Legend: Selection, rollover color, and shadow cannot display by default.

Designer

Enhancements:

  1. The Roboto font family is added to all the dashboard components.
  2. Data Service:
    1. The empty filter keys cannot be passed in SOAP envelope.
    2. User Custom fields are now accessible through the dashboard script.
    3. Encode URL: Users can encode the inputs before calling the ‘getRecords’ service for the dashboard.
    4. The ‘Endpoint Listing Service’ is introduced to improve dashboard performance
    5. PA Service is updated to support SSL for the Predictive Workbench Spark Workflows.
    6. Data service list can be sorted.
  3. Dashboard
    1. Open Doc calling inside a dashboard is updated with an SDK method.
    2. HTTP/HTTPS can be removed from all .woff file as now it calls data from font.css files
  4. Designer SDK Methods
    1. SDK methods are added to import Google fonts inside the dashboard
    2. SDK methods are provided to re-set field properties of components
    3. A platform service has been added to get unused spaces.

Predictive Workbench:

Enhancements:

  1. Forecasting Algorithm: The ‘Result’ tab can now display ‘Upper Range’ and ‘Lower Range.’ columns.
  2. Scheduler: Custom Cron expression has been added in the PA Scheduler to simplify the R modeling process.
Notes:
  1. Spark and R workflows work independently. Users cannot use Spark and R components together in one Workflow. The workspace will not allow dragging a Spark Component if the current workflow has a Spark component and vice versa.
  2. Users must run a predictive model, before saving it.
  3. Due to browser constraints, the data set that can be viewed in the table/chart has been limited to 50,000 cells.
  4. Spark workflow supports only Cassandra Data Source/Data Writer.
  5. Spark workflows do not support scheduling.

Recommendations:

Product Description
Dashboard Designer For best performance, while using ‘Paging Grid’ records should be kept under 5000.
For best performance, while using Excel/CSV as a connector, Excel/CSV file size should be under 3 MB.
Excel/CSV data should be structured as the same as a database table.
Due to limited browser memory, a chart can draw up to 150K data points more data can lead to browser crash.
Country/State names should be mentioned while using the map component.
More than 60 chart/grid components in a dashboard will make DOM cumbersome and lead to browser failure.
For best performance, while viewing a dashboard, the latest version of browsers should be used.
Business Story A server with 32GB RAM and 4 Core CPU must configure the Business Story application.
Elastic search server should be distributed minimum 16GB.
For best performance, while scheduling Data store use ‘Batch query’ option effectively.
Usage of ‘*’ and ‘limit’ are not recommended in SQL select statement of Data Store (E.g., choose top 100 from employee, select * from employee).
Segregation of fields into Dimensions, Measures, and Time Groups should be done properly.

Known Limitations:

Product Description
Dashboard Designer Group Bar Chart: Data does not merge; it gets overlapped when ‘Merge’ sub-category is enabled.
Heatmap Chart: Cells display ‘NaN’ instead of ‘Null’ values.
Bubble & Time Line Charts: ‘Show Label Value’ cannot display the values which are not reflecting while the axis is set to min/max values.
Charts: Auto unit and default precision cannot plot proper axis markers without duplication.
Pie Chart: The Component size changes in the preview mode.
Time Series Chart: Date/Time category marker does not display for all the columns.
The ‘Cancel’ button does not work while editing the charts.
Data Grid: Scroll Bar should not show when using text wrap.
Scorecard: Range indicators do not work properly with aggregation. They display 0 on the parent row whereas aggregation = false | indicator = false.
Legend: Column with a numeric name is moved to the first place when associated with charts/grids.
‘Hide Component’ and ‘Show Component’ methods do not support the CamelCase component names.
Dashboard: The newly created data connectors/data services do not reflect in the drop-down menu while mapping the data for an already selected dashboard connection.
Data Preparation Ability to connect and accept input from BizViz connectors (JIRA and Google Analytics) is not yet supported.
Accept and Transform Streaming Datasets is not yet supported.
Workflow Feature Limitations:
  1. Rename, Copy, Move Workflows between folders
  2. Send notifications when Scheduled workflow runs finish.
  3. Schedule workflows every few minutes.
  4. UI Usability limitations in some areas.

Test Environment Details:

BDB 3 Sp1 (3.1) was tested on a clustered BizViz and Elastic search nodes in AWS.

The test environment details are as explained below:

  • Two BizViz server node which had 4 core 30 GB in each. i.e., a total of 8 core, 60 GB RAM
  • One AWS load balancer through which load was balanced to the BizViz server
  • Three nodes Elastic search cluster, each node had 4 cores, 30 GB RAM, and 80 HDD
  • MySQL on RDS was used as BizViz Repo DB – MySQL version 5.6.37, server details 2 cores, 8 GB RAM

The test workflow included 100+ People Logging on multiple devices on 10 spaces simultaneously for 60 mins and tested various Dashboard and Business Story Workflows Successfully.

We did find out some Performance bottleneck on using filters and saving a view in the Business story, that will be addressed in BDB 3 Sp2 (by the end of Jan 2018). Therefore 3.1 passes the Multi-Tenancy and Performance Tests.

Connect with BDB Expert

Connect Now