ODTUG Innovation Award 2019 Update

The ODTUG Innovation Award honors excellence in creative, effective, innovative use of Oracle development tools within ODTUG's supported communities (APEX, Analytics, EPM, Database). The goal is to honor developersindividuals or teamswhose passion and creativity shine through in their application of Oracle technology to address real-world problems. 

Our 2019 submissions crossed all communities—our Database community nominations included the ASH Viewer, extensions to Oracle Health Check (who knew you could do that?), and a system for dynamic Oracle performance analytics. The APEX community contributed an impressive Workflow project, and we received interesting projects from our EPM and Analytics communities.

We were very impressed by everyone who submitted their innovations this year, but we found that none of the submissions fully embodied the mission of the award. Therefore, we will not be announcing a winner.

We would like to honor this year’s top submission. The Innovation Award Honorable Mention goes to Gary Adashek, GE, for his custom Oracle Data Visualizations Extensions: Elbow Dendogram, Vertical Waterfall and Butterfly Visualization, working with Diego Flores, also from GE.

Gary and Diego created three custom plugins that are available to download, import, and start using immediately with any of your Oracle Data Visualization (Oracle DV) projects.

1) Elbow Dendrogram Viz

2) Vertical Waterfall Viz

3) Butterfly Viz

Building the custom plugins started with Gary’s recent interest to learn more about visualization. Since being diagnosed with a rare eye condition, the subject matter and domain of data visualization became exponentially important to him. It became more than that—it became personal.

All of the plugins are developed with the intent that they would be hierarchy aware, especially for EPM (Hyperion) applications (i.e. Essbase).

 

 Gary pic 1.png

 

The first plugin, the “Elbow” Dendrogram, was developed with the intent to visualize hierarchies since there are no by-default visualizations in Oracle DV that do so naturally. In addition, this visualization looks similar to how many people recognize hierarchy structures, albeit in a Windows environment or in an Essbase outline. The magic that makes this visualization being so useful is the fact that a user is not required to have a measure in the canvas; this visualization works with and without a measure element!

 

 Gary pic 2.png

 

The second plugin, the Vertical Waterfall, was developed as an adaptation of what many people know as the traditional waterfall diagram, which is a visualization that is part of the defaults in Oracle DV. With the customizations, the bars and text may be read top-to-bottom and left-to-right much more easily—the way the majority of natural language is read around the world. Not to mention that a waterfall in nature flows this way as well.

 

 Gary pic 3.png

The third plugin to date is the Butterfly and it was developed to take advantage of multidimensional data and the ability to set and compare side by side along a common visualization row (attribute spine) i.e. to compare Actuals vs Budget data. There is simply not a visualization that does this by default today. The Butterfly Chart is a commonly known visualization recognized by the Hyperion (EPM) community, as Oracle Smart View for Office includes the ability to create a similar numerical representation. The difference is that this plugin takes the numerical data from a pure row and column on a grid and transforms it to be represented as a side-by-side bar chart comparison.

All three of the custom plugins developed to date are available to anyone to download for free and import to use in an Oracle DV project.

To our knowledge Gary and Diego are the first non-Oracle persons to produce Oracle DV plugins, and their examples are stunning.  Congratulations to Gary and Diego!

As always, many thanks to our esteemed Judges:

  • Stewart Bryson – Red Pill Analytics, 2018 Innovation Award winner for his product Checkmate, an impressive tool to control and automate your Oracle Analytics development.
  • Vincent Morneau – Insum, 2017 Innovation Award winner for his product APEX Nitro, the essential APEX development companion.
  • Mia Urman – AuraPlayer, 2016 Innovation Award winner for AuaPlayer’s integration of mobile technology to revitalize legacy Oracle Forms applications.
  • Tim Gorman – ACE Director, Senior Technical Manager for Delphix, Oak Table member, all-round Oracle DB and security expert, trusted friend of Oracle user groups.
  • John King – Oracle, long-time ODTUG Board member and expert trainer of all things Oracle.
  • Peter Koletzke – Quovera, ACE Director, JDeveloper/ADF Guru, Editor Extraordinaire, Multi-Oracle user group award winner and Board member.
  • Karen Cannell – TH Technology, ODTUG Board member, editor emeritus ODTUG Technical Journal, long-time ODTUG fan and user group supporter.

 

 

Recent Stories
Introducing the Newest Members of the ODTUG 2024 Board of Directors

2024 ODTUG Board Nominations - Guidelines

Board Nomination: Candidate Example