Arcadia Enterprise 4.0.0.0
(ArcViz 4.0.0.0, ArcEngine 2.5.4)
This document contains release information notes for Arcadia Enterprise.
It is accurate at the time of publication. Arcadia Data updates release notes periodically
after the software release.
For the rest of the changes, see the following sections of these release notes:
Home Page
In this release, we added some helpful information directly to the default home page,
including an overview of the number of visuals and other items, quick navigation to
frequently used visuals, recently created visuals, sample dashboards, and so on. An
introduction to the key new features of the most recent release is available when you click
What's New in Arcadia Enterprise 4.0.
See our Home Page article for more
details.
Connectivity
- MS SQL Server Connection
- Starting with this release, you can connect to data on the Microsoft SQL Server. See
Creating New Microsoft SQL Server Connections.
- Result Cache
-
Some of the powerful data caching that is automatically enabled for Arcadia Engine
connections can now be seen on other connection types.
Starting with this release, you can enhance performance for other connections types by
enabling a periodic refresh though the Result Cache option.
- To affect all datasets on a connection, make this selection in the Connection
Editor. See Specifying
Cache on Arcadia connections, as an example.
- For finer control, make this selection for individual datasets in the
Dataset Detail interface.
This feature requires the Create and Manage Dataset privileges.
Please note that while this improves performance significantly, Arcadia Engine
connections are the only ones that feature Data Coherent Caching, refreshing the
MetaStore whenever the data or the schema change.
- Locale Settings
- When importing a CSV file, you can now specify the locale, or localization parameters.
See Changing the Locale Setting of an Imported File.
Visualizations
This release introduces a significant improvement and ease to working with
visualizations.
- Terminology
We updated some key terminology:
Visuals are charts that
deliver direct insights by representing your data visually.
Choose from one of our 29 out-of-the-box visualizations. See our
Visual Type Catalog.
Dashboards combine
multiple visuals with interactive filtering on the same 'page', for full dynamic
interoperability.
Apps are groups of dashboards
and visuals. We designed Apps so you may launch our visuals and dashboards as
stand-alone, branded applications.
- Inline Settings
- The New Visual Designer uses inline settings and styling options for Visuals and
Dashboards.
- In-Dashboard Editing of Visuals
- You now have the ability to create and edit visuals directly in the dashboard. With the
dashboard open in the Visual Designer, simply click the edit button or double-click on a
visual to edit it.
- Network Visual
-
We introduce this visual type to represent connections and relationships in systems
and structures. Two dimensions represent start and end notes, and are connected by the
value of the measurement.
See Network Visuals. For customization
options, see Network Settings.
- Dendrogram Visual
-
This visual type expresses hierarchical relationships in data. Its two dimension
provide the start and end points of the connection, which is the aggregate
measure.
See Dendrogram Visuals. For customization
options, see Dendrogram Settings.
- Rich Text Visual
-
Using the Rich Text Editor, you can add visuals with formatted text and images to
dashboards and applications.
See Rich Text Visuals.
- Field Statistics Visual
This visual provides automatic statistics about each field of the dataset. It includes a
histogram or top K visualization for distribution of values on each field. There
are no configurable shelves.
See Field Statistics Visuals.
For customization options, see Field
Statistics Settings.
- Static Assets
- Starting with this release, you can upload static assets (such as image files, CSS
definition files, and JS definitions) and use them in your visuals, dashboards, and
applications. See Managing Static Assets.
- Aggregate Functions
- In this release, we expanded our range of previously supported aggregate functions
(Sum, Count, Approx Distinct
Count, Exact Distinct Count, Minimum, Maximum, Average, and String Concat) to
include statistical functions Approx Median, Standard
Deviation, Variance, and Population
Variance.
- See Aggregates.
- Enhanced Email Notification
- In this release, we considerably extended the email sharing options. In addition to
enriching the options available when preparing ad-hoc emails, you can now
schedule regular email jobs.
- You can also set up email notifications that are triggered when data meets a
particular threshold.
See Emailing Dashboards, Sheets, and Visuals, and the three email types:
Data Discovery
- Drill
- Drill into data details by clicking on visual elements, such as individual bars. This
enables you to view the subset of the data, as any dimension of the dataset.
- Bars, Areas, Lines, and Grouped Bars visual types show the Drill functionality. To use
the Drill feature, be sure to enable the Display Context Menus within Visuals.
- Filter All
- Filter across all visuals in a dashboard.
Administration
- Job Scheduler
Starting with this release, users can check the status of their jobs, re-run them, pause,
re-start, and so on, from the Jobs interface, as described in Managing Jobs.
- All jobs can be monitored and managed from the Job Log interface.
- Scheduled emails and Analytical View refreshes can be monitored and managed from
the Scheduled Jobs
interface.
- Schedule intervals may be created, customized, monitored, and altered (by users
with administrative privileges) from the Manage Schedule Intervals
interface.
- Visual Migration
-
The new Migration feature provides a graphical user interface for migrating visuals
and related assets from one environment to another. See Migrating Visual Artifacts.
We also provide a REST API to facilitate a programmatic approach
to migration. See Migration with REST APIs.
- ArcEngine Logs
- Starting with this release, users with administrative privileges can ArcEngine logs
through a graphical user interface, which also displays ArcViz logs.
- Visual Performance Profile
- To view query performance information for visuals and dashboards, simply click the
following combination of keys: control + shift + G .
- Table and Column Statistics
- The Connection Explorer shows Table and Columns statistics for the selected source table.
- Data API Keys
- To authenticate with the system for some administrative tasks, the user must have API
Keys. See Managing API Keys.
- Performance Profile
- In this release, Arcadia Enterprise exposes the time it takes to perform
the individual components of a request: measure the time it takes to process the
dataset, run the query, load the static assets, and finally render a visual in a
browser. This enables the user to identify the exact operations that can be optimized to
improve overall performance.
- Admin API
- Arcadia Enterprise provides URL access to ArcViz server objects through the Admin API.
Security
- Ranger
Starting with this release, Arcadia Enterprise supports Apache Ranger authorization
for Hortonworks installations.
See Authorization with Ranger.
- RBAC Improvements
- Starting with this release, users have Manage Dataset (modify/access)
permissions for datasets they create.
Arcadia Engine
- AWS3 Storage Support for Analytical Views
- Starting with this release, Arcadia Enterprise supports analytical views
based on tables with storage in HDFS, in S3, or both. We can also store the analytical
views on S3.
- Derived Data Queries
-
Queries that use derived data are partially or fully routed to analytical views.
- Refresh Analytical View
-
This release introduces many performance improvements, such as:
- Analytical view refresh is faster due to grouping partitioned insert statements.
- Regex-based functions are optimized to run faster.
- Matching Analytical Views to Analytic Functions
-
Arcadia Enterprise has improved matching of analytical views over
logical views with analytic functions in queries.