Ten reasons to use Oracle Analytics with APEX to build your applications

Published in

Oracle Developers

4 min readOct 11

I’ve previously written technical blogs on how to embed Oracle Analytics into an APEX application interactively, i.e., making APEX UI controls such as multi-selectors and faceted searches interact with the embedded Oracle Analytics content. In this blog, I’ll describe some of the benefits that each product can bring to an overall application user experience.

Get Started Quickly

Both Analytics and APEX allow you to get up and running very quickly with easy to use low-code/no-code interfaces. In both products, you can start by uploading a spreadsheet using intuitive wizards. This is a great way to start prototyping an idea you may have for an analytic application and experimenting with different visualizations that provide the most useful insights.

Embed Analytics Where it’s Most Useful

APEX is a natural product for building business process and workflow applications. Often, these applications require decisions to be taken by the end users. What better way to enhance decision making by embedding the insights from analytics where those decisions are being made.

Use the Same Data Sources

Both Oracle Analytics and APEX connect to many different data sources, database connections and REST data sources. This makes creating an integrated analytic experience much easier if you’re dealing with the same data source.

Use Analytics Dataflows to Populate Database Tables

Extending the previous point, Oracle Analytics dataflows provide a user friendly way to create curated datasets, including the ability to store the results in a database table, that is easy to access using APEX.

Take Advantage of the Analytics Semantic Layer

The Oracle Analytics semantic layer provides an extrememley powerful data virtualization capability across federated data sources, enabling analytics developers to create an access layer tailored for business end users. Analytics canvases based on this semantic layer can then be interactively embedded into an APEX application.

Use Faceted Searches with Oracle Analytics

A faceted search user experience is very common on various websites, and provides an intuitive way to narrow down a selection of data. APEX provides a way to programmatically access the values of the facets chosen by the user, and by embedding Oracle Analytics using the JavaScript embedding framework, or by passing parameters on an embedded analytics workbook URL, you have an integrated user experience.

Bring Natural Language Generation to APEX

Oracle Analytics Cloud includes a natural language generation visualization out of the box. By connecting Analytics to the same datasource used by APEX and mapping the APEX selectors to embedded Analytics filters and parameters, the result is an integrated natural language generation experience.

Enhance Analytics with APEX Write Back

A key feature of APEX is being able to enter and modify data. This is complimentary to the visualizations available with Analytics.

Embed an Interactive Analytics Experience

Analytics visualizations are interactive out of the box with the ability for users to drill, sort, keep or remove selected items, drag and drop columns, zoom on the chart and export data. All this can be configured on a per canvas basis.

Complimentary Identity Management

Out of the box, APEX identity management uses Oracle APEX Accounts. Oracle Analytics, on the other hand, uses Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS). The easiest way to provide an integrated security model is to configure APEX by creating ‘Web Credentials’ and an ‘Authentication Scheme’ within APEX that use the same Oracle IDCS as Analytics. Here are some links (1)(2)(3) to articles that describe how to configure APEX for IDCS authentication.

I hope this blog encourages you to try out emebdding Oracle Analytics into your APEX applications, or if you’re already using Oracle Analytics, to take a look at what APEX can offer you as a way to create interactive Analytics applications that can offer ease of use, business process and workflow, write back and data entry / edits. There are many other benefits to using these two products together (e.g. using APEX quick SQL to generate database objects and test data for use with Analytics) but I hope those listed here will get you started.