Release Notes, 4.2.0.0

Features for Power Users

Workspaces

Starting with this release, workspaces create a new functional organizational and security level for working with dashboards. See our discussion of this powerful feature in Working with Workspaces.

Multi-Sheet dashboards

You can now clone dashboards, and also move them between workspaces. Additionally, dashboards support multiple sheets for organizing visual artifacts. See our documentation on Working with Dashboards.

Dashboard sheets

Dashboard sheets organize all related visuals on a single screen. Having multiple sheets in the same dashboard enables you to design comprehensive dashboards and categorize the information along distinct lines of enquiry, simultaneously. See the documentation on Working with Sheets.

No standalone visuals

Starting with this release, visuals can no longer exist on their own; instead, they are automatically part of a dashboard.

All new visuals and dashboards are private, until the user shares them either by adding them to the Public workspace, or by publishing to a specific workspace with defined role-based access.

When you migrate to this release, you may notice that Arcadia Enterprise changed your standalone visuals by wrapping them inside a sheet, inside a dashboard. If you previously used a visual in multiple dashboards, we migrated it as a linked visual.

Linked visuals

To reuse highly effective visuals, you can mark them as Linked, making them visible to all dashboards in the workspace. See Visuals.

Worksheet permissions in RBAC

The RBAC matrix includes a new system-level privilege for creating workspaces, Create workspaces. See Role Based Access Control.

Enhanced email HTML templates

In this release, we introduce email templates. They feature a rich text editor, ability to add logos and other graphics, and configurable messages that include embedded Arcadia job parameters.

See Managing Email Templates.

As a result, you can choose from a variety of existing templates when configuring emails, be they immediate, scheduled, or triggered.

Visual Enhancements

New KPI visual type

The Key Performance Indicator (KPI) visual type replaces the Single Value visual, and provides an insightful and highly configurable summary report.

See KPI Visuals and KPI Settings.

Limiting downloaded rows

Starting with this release, you can limit the number of rows downloaded through CSV for each visual type. See Changing Number of Rows to Download.

Data detail on context menus

In this release, you can examine details of data that make up a particular element of a visual, directly from its context menu. See Detailed Data Discovery and Showing Detail Data Button in Context Menu.

Qualitative ranges on gauge visuals

In this release, you can specify the qualitative ranges of gauge visuals as percentages of the Compare To value. See Specifying Qualitative Range as Percentages.

Table visuals

This release adds the Tooltip shelf to this visual, which can hold other measurements for quick visual analysis. They fields in the Tooltip also appear in the CSV download of the data. See Using the Tooltips Shelf.

To learn how to sort table rows based on column values, see Sorting the Table Visual.

Cross tabulation visuals

In addition to being able to report column totals in cross tabulation visuals, this release lets you see row totals. When using multiple measures, the row totals have a separate summations. In cases where it makes sense to calculate the totals at the same time, you can show combined totals. Additionally, we provide support for highlighting adjacent duplicate values.

Compensate for missing date/time data

In this release, you can show a continuous date-time access in charts, even if time intervals of data are unavailable. See Enabling Continuous Axis for Date/Time Values.

Autocomplete on by default

By default, fields that use Expression Editor have the Autocomplete option on.

Cloning visuals

Starting with this release, cloning a visual automatically adds it to the bottom of the dashboard of the original visual. See Cloning Visuals.

Streaming Analytics

Define custom ranges for dashboards

You can now define custom dateranges (last minute, last hour, and so on). See Managing Custom Dates.

Anchoring dashboard filters to now()

One of the benefits of custom dateranges in this release is the ability to specify and anchor a relative filter to now, today, or a specific date and time. See Creating New Custom Dateranges.

Quick filters for custom ranges

Quick Filter buttons enable us to access custom ranges on dashboard. To learn how to configure them in a dashboard, see Configuring Ranges on Dashboard Filters. To use them, see Using Quick Filters.

Pause and play dashboards with auto-refresh

You can pause and play all dashboards with dynamic content, in either view and edit mode. See

Business Self-Service

Explore visuals

In this release, Arcadia Enterprise makes suggestions that optimize your development work:

• Choosing a visual

  Place the relevant fields on the shelves of the visual, click the Explore Visuals option at the top of the Visual catalog, and Arcadia Enterprise offers you broad range of visual options. Use the one that supports your business case – vertical or horizontal bars, trellised measures, grouped bars, combo charts, packed bubbles, line dimensions, and many more.

• Color options

  Click Explore Colors, and Arcadia Enterprise renders your visuals and dashboards in a variety of palette options, so you can select the ones that work best in your dashboard.

• Setting options

  When you Explore Settings Arcadia Enterprise suggests setting options such as bar width, grid lines, labels, and so on.

• Style options

  Explore Styles suggests alternate fonts, font sizes, and other formatting options.

See Explore Visual Options.

Complex data types made simple

Starting with this release, Arcadia Enterprise supports the use of complex data type fields through Impala and Arcadia connections. We build MAP, ARRAY, and STRUCT types, and complex types that are nested combinations of these and primitive types. ArcViz displays complex types in an intuitive nested structure for use in Dataset customization and as direct 'drag and drop' objects when building visuals. The queries run in native SQL.

See Complex Data Types.

Comprehensive email support across all levels of visual artifacts

Starting with this release, Arcadia Enterprise supports email for visuals, sheets, and entire dashboards. The email may be immediate, scheduled, or triggered by specified events in the data.

See Emailing Dashboards, Sheets, and Visuals.

Workspaces for Dashboard Organization and Governance

Workspaces create a new functional organizational and security level for working with dashboards. All dashboards reside now in workspaces. By default, Arcadia Enterprise places new dashboards into the creator's private workspace. Users with adequate role privileges can manage granular permissions to workspaces for other users and groups, and publish dashboards to workspaces, or move and clone them. See our discussion of this powerful feature in Working with Workspaces.

Dataset Publishing

Publishing (sharing) datasets

This release introduces the concept of dataset publishing, an RBAC-based approach for creators to share their new datasets and grant various access levels to the members of their team, based on their role, directly from the dataset interface. See Publishing Datasets.

RBAC enhancements

The Dataset Publishing workflow adds three role-based privileges to the RBAC system: Grant manage dataset, Grant manage dashboards, and Grant view dashboards. The new RBAC privileges control how the different roles manage dataset permissions. See Role Based Access Control.

Smart Query Execution

Starting with this release, you can configure non-accelerated queries to re-route to an alternate engine, such as Hive, Imapla, and SparkSQL. This lowers ArcEngine processing and resource utilization on cluster significantly.

See Fallback for Arcadia Connections.

Metadata and Semantic Layer Enhancements

Recommendation engine

Starting with this release, Arcadia Enterprise tracks and reports more metadata information for the Analytical View Recommendation UI, ranks existing and proposed analytical views in terms of best fit to the original query, and allows you to schedule regular refreshes for these analytical views. See Using Arcadia Smart Acceleration.

Dataset-level display formatting

Prior to this release, field display could be configured for each visual. However, this specification could not be picked up in other visuals. In Arcadia Enterprise Release 4.2.0.0, you can configure field display at the dataset level. See Changing the Field Display Format.

Dataset-level expression editor

Similarly, full expression editor for fields can now be accessed on the dataset level, enhancing the creation of calculated fields. See Creating Calculated Fields.

Performance and Scale Enhancements

User concurrency

Arcadia Enterprise delivers higher user concurrency in this release by deploying multiple ArcViz instances on a single node.

Multi-process ArcViz

Starting with this release, Arcadia Enterprise maintains high level of performance for a large number of users by deploying in multi-process mode by default. See Multi-Process ArcViz.

Metadata server interaction

This release delivers improved the interaction with the metadata server.

Improved visual rendering

Faster performance on the Visuals interface.

Monitoring visual performance

Arcadia Enterprise helps you debug your dashboard performance by providing detailed statistics on the rendering and querying operations of the visuals. See Monitoring Dashboard Performance Profile.

Certification for IE 11 and MS Edge

In this release, we certify the smooth operation of Arcadia Enterprise with Internet Explorer 11 and Edge. See Internet Browsers.

Licensing

Starting with this release, Arcadia Enterprise contains a license key that describes the number of nodes licensed, the expiration date, and similar information. ArcViz UI issues a notification if the license file is not valid, or if the system is running on an excess number of nodes. For details on reviewing or renewing your license, see Licensing Arcadia Enterprise.

Smarter Acceleration

Eager aggregation

Eager aggregation re-writes star schema queries to optimize analytical views.

See Eager Aggregation.

Broader availability of analytical view recommendations

We expanded analytical view recommendations to optimize the performance of queries with logical views, derived data, and unions, which we implemented through segments as dimensions.

Intelligent analytical view selection

This release introduces a new robust cost model for selecting analytical views. See ArcEngine Cost Model.

Improved Security, Administration and Maintenance

Column-level security

Arcadia Enterprise now implements column-level security when using Sentry and Ranger, including authorization with analytical views. See Restricting Column-Level Access and Authorizing Access to Analytical Views.

New logging tables

We now maintain two new additional catalog log tables, to enable real-time and historic reporting on product usage statistics. They are, respectively, arcadia_catalog.inflight_queries and arcadia_catalog.completed_queries. See ArcEngine Catalog Tables.

Auditing for Ranger

In this release, we enabled auditing support for Ranger. See Auditing with Ranger.

Auditing for Sentry

This release introduces improved auditing for Sentry. See Auditing with Sentry.

Hive notification integration

We now integrate with the Hive notification system to automatically refresh the metadata cache. See Updating ArcEngine Metadata Automatically with Hive Notification.

Recognizing base table changes

Starting with this release, Arcadia Engine recognizes changes to base tables in HIVE, and invalidates the dependent analytical views.

Upgraded Core Engine Components

Microsoft Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) compatibility

Starting with this release, Arcadia Enterprise provides automatic read and write support for Microsoft Azure Data Lake Store, commonly known as ADLS.

Kudu compatibility

This release of Arcadia Enterprise supports the Apache Kudu storage format.

Performance

We are releasing many features that contribute to overall performance, new functions and syntax, enhancements to security, and many more performance-related features.

Wider Certification

This release expands support for Arcadia Enterprise to CDH 5.13, HDP 2.6, and MapR 5.2.1.

To see our entire certification matrix, please review Certifications.