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Oracle Spatial

Oracle Spatial Studio 20.1 – Time Sliders

Oracle Spatial Studio 20.1 was released in early December 2020 and has some great new features. I presented a few of these at the UKOUG virtual event and if you’re a member you can see the replay at the UKOUG website.

One feature I wanted to highlight is the ability to view data over time using a new ‘time slider’ function. All this needs is data with a time element and we can use that to look at the data from the time perspective.

Let’s start with looking for some data with a time element. Start with my 21c Autonomous Warehouse

21c Autonomous Warehouse

Here I have a table with some data that I previously geocoded using Spatial Studio.

We have 299 customer records in this table

It is sales information which is distributed over 3 days

Shows the 299 customer sales recrods spread over 3 days

If we create a dataset in Spatial Studio then we can see the properties

So as we have geocoded data with a date column we can now create a project with that dataset and visualise the data.

Create a project

Visualising the whole dataset we see all the customers on all days.

Visualise all of the data to start with

Now, in Spatial Studio 20.1 when we go into the visualization settings, we can see the option to add a Time Slider.

This pops up a time slider ‘template’ on the canvas with a ‘settings wheel’ next to it.

Time Slider appears

Clicking on the settings, we can now select the date column we want to use in the dataset (in this case we just have one) and also set the time unit for the time slider. Our data is in days over a three day period, so a time unit of Days is the one to select.

Now the Time Slider on the canvas view is initiated and defaults to the first date in the data set.

Time Slider with data

We can now see data appropriate for that day – and we had 28 customer records on the 23rd December and these are now shown on the canvas view.

Data for 23rd December

Now we can move the slider and the data responds to the date selected.

Data for 24th December

So, if we slide across to the 25th December we see the larger group of 232 elements we have on that day.

Data for the 25th December

This ability works on other visualisations too, so if we set it to heat map instead of individual data points, we see this for 23rd Dec

Heatmap for Dec 23rd

Moving to December 24th

Data for 24th Dec

Finally, moving across to the 25th December

Heatmap for December 25th

Here we showed how we can take a geocoded dataset with a time column (in our case a date column with sales data across 3 days) and can use the new Time Slider capability to view that data on a day by day basis.