Release Notes 2021.3.2

Release Highlights

The Incorta Cloud 2021.3.2 release introduces new features and enhancements that enrich the user experience. These include materializing Incorta tables to parquet files rather than snapshot files to make them available to Spark and SQLi tools, an enhanced version of the Microsoft Excel Add-in, and the introduction of Microsoft OneDrive as a data destination. In addition, this release introduces the support for multiple drill-down configurations for a single column, enhancements to the built-in functions, enhancements to the Incorta SQL Engine, and multiple fixed issues related to dashboards, physical schemas, connectors, and integrators. Incorta Cloud is now more user-focused, extensive, reliable, and accessible.

New features

The following is a list of the new features introduced in the Incorta Cloud 2021.3.2 release:

• Materializing Incorta tables to parquet
• Incorta SQL engine support for OR in join conditions
• A new version of the Excel Add-in
• Microsoft OneDrive as a Data Destination
• Support for additional parameters in boolean functions
• Support for multiple drill down configurations for a single column

Materializing Incorta tables to parquet

Before release 2021.3.2, the Loader Service wrote Incorta tables (Incorta Analyzer tables and Incorta SQL tables) in snapshot ddm files that are accessible only by the Incorta Analytics Service. As Apache Spark does not read snapshot files, you you could not reference columns in these Incorta tables in a materialized view. In addition, SQL Interface (SQLi) could only have access to these Incorta tables through the Engine port, which led to some limitations when accessing them through external visualization or machine learning tools.

In this release, the Loader Service writes full parquet files, instead of snapshot ddm files, for these Incorta tables to allow the following:

• Better support for external tools access to Incorta Analyzer tables and Incorta SQL tables through SQLi
• Materialized views to reference columns in Incorta tables (in other physical schemas only)
• Formula columns to be in parquet files by materializing formula columns in Incorta tables instead of physical schema tables, which enhances formula column performance and availability to external tools
• Using flattened result sets in many use cases, such as data destinations and analytics and machine learning workflows

Additional considerations

• Materializing Incorta tables to parquet files leads to a longer load time than in older releases.
• Incorta tables do not support the following features:
  • Key columns
  • Encrypted columns
  • load filters
  • Self-join relations
• Loading a physical schema with Incorta tables imported from older releases will throw errors if these Incorta tables have unsupported configurations, such as key columns, encrypted columns, load filters, or self-joins. Disable or delete these settings before running a load job.
• When the Loader Service fails to materialize an Incorta table for any reason, it writes an empty parquet file for this object.

Incorta SQL engine support for OR in join conditions

In older releases, the Incorta SQL engine did not support the OR operator in the JOIN clause. Thus, the OR conditions were pushed to the where clause resulting in a CROSS JOIN relationship that produced a large join result set. This led to either out-of-memory (OOM) errors or a long execution time.

In this release, the Incorta SQL engine supports OR in join conditions. This results in optimal execution time and enhanced memory utilization.

A new version of the Excel Add-in

A new version of the Excel Add-in is now available. Here are some key features of the new version:

• It is bundled with Incorta to minimize manual configuration
• It is cross-platform, supporting both Excel for Windows and Excel for Mac.
• It supports Centralized Deployment, simplifying the deployment of the Excel Add-in to local user machines.
• It supports automatic updates.

To learn more, review External Integrations → Excel Add-in

Microsoft OneDrive as a Data Destination

This release introduces Microsoft OneDrive as a data destination to which you can export one or more supported insights. To learn more, review Concepts → Data Destination.

Support for additional parameters in boolean functions

In this release, the startsWith and contains boolean functions now support multiple find parameters. To learn more, review Built-in Functions → startsWith and Built-in Functions → contains.

Support for multiple drill down configurations for a single column

Starting with this release, you can drill down to different dashboard tabs from a single insight column. If you add multiple configurations for a given column to drill down to the same dashboard tab, only one option for all of them will be available when you select this column on the insight.

Additional enhancements and fixes

This release introduces major enhancements and fixes that help to make Incorta more stable, engaging, and reliable.

Integrations

• Resolved the connection error when using SQLi to connect to Incorta from Power BI on the SQL interface port or data store port
• Changed Tableau queries to execute in parallel to improve performance for SQLi

Connectors

• Resolved the NetSuite Web Services data source connection failure
• Fixed an issue where selecting the Edit (pen icon) for the NetSuite Web Services data source displayed the wrong connector properties

Physical Schemas

• Fixed an issue where removing the source of an Alias table from a schema and re-adding it resulted in an incorrect display of the Alias columns on the dashboard
• Fixed an issue where loading a schema caused the Job Load Status to be stuck in the loading phase
• Fixed an issue where updating a schema caused the Model Update Status to be stuck in the inQueue phase
• Fixed an issue where the schema did not timeout when the Enable Data Agent property is toggled on

Visualizations

• Enhanced the functionality of the row-level subtotal for Pivot table and Aggregate table visualizations where enabling the Show Subtotal property in a pill overwrote the Subtotal property in the Settings panel and vice versa
• Fixed an issue that caused the display of an incorrect data format when enabling the Percentage of Column setting for the Percent Column, Percent Bar, Percent Area, and Percent Line visualizations
• Fixed an issue in the Combo visualization where the Label Rotation had a default value of Auto instead of Default in the maximized view settings

Dashboards

• Fixed an issue that caused the chat icon to appear in the dashboard sent or downloaded as HTML
• Fixed an issue where sending or downloading a dashboard with a presentation variable not used by any table insight resulted in table rendering failure
• Fixed an issue where sending dashboards with multiple tabs that had unsupported visualizations in the middle tabs resulted in not sending supported visualizations in the last tabs

Miscellaneous

• Fixed an issue with the analytics engine, where the schemaRefreshTime function returned NULL instead of the actual refresh time value for a certain schema
• Fixed an issue with loading the rest of the tables where they used to be on halt when one table failed to load
• Fixed an issue with loading schemas that had errors where it showed loading although the loading process failed
• Enhanced the process of refreshing tenant configurations to be performed only when you edit a configuration
• Enhanced the Data Wizard for a better user experience and interaction
• Introduced user onboarding questions to capture user persona for an enhanced user experience
• Fixed an issue that caused the Data Condition section to not display properly when resizing the Create Data Notification dialog