The November 2023 Update for Oracle Analytics Cloud came out a few weeks ago, and this article describes the enhanced Restore Deliveries options related to enabling or disabling agents in your instances.

Agents allow you to automate your business processes. You can use them to provide event-driven alerting, scheduled content publishing, and conditional event-driven action execution. Until now, when restoring agents from a snapshot or migrating them from a different environment, delivery schedules ended up disabled in the target instance even if they were enabled in the source one, and must be enabled again manually or through a custom script.

The new Restore Deliveries options give you greater flexibility when restoring agents on your Oracle Analytics Cloud instances. For instance, you can enable delivery schedules immediately after restoration, eliminating the need for manual intervention or custom scripts!

Restoring Deliveries: Overview

To restore deliveries, begin by expanding the Navigator menu, and then select Monitor Deliveries in the Console page (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Monitor Deliveries section in the Console page

Within this section, click on the Action menu for the page, and select Restore Deliveries (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The Restore Deliveries option in the Monitor Deliveries page

Select one of the available options, and then click on the Restore button (Figure 3):

  • Maintain Delivery Schedule Status - All delivery schedules maintain their status. It means that agents with enabled delivery schedules retain their status once migrated and restored. Existing delivery schedules remain unchanged.

  • Disable Delivery Schedules for New Deliveries - Delivery schedules are disabled for new deliveries created during the restore process. Existing delivery schedules remain unchanged.

  • Disable All Delivery Schedules And Delete All History - All delivery schedules are disabled (both existing schedules and new delivery schedules created during the restore process).

Figure 3. The enhanced Restore Deliveries options

Restoring Deliveries: Practical Examples

Let’s suppose that in our Oracle Analytics Cloud instance there are a couple of agents: “Test Agent 1” with a monthly schedule enabled, and “Test Agent 2” with a daily schedule disabled. The Monitor Deliveries page will show something similar to Figure 4 when the All Times option is selected, and the Show Scheduled Deliveries checkbox is ticked:

Figure 4. The existing delivery schedules in the example instance

We want to use the archive/unarchive features to migrate a new agent (“Test Agent 3”) into our instance from a different environment. This agent has a weekly schedule enabled in the source environment, but it won’t be visible on the Monitor Deliveries page in the target instance until we restore and enable (or disable) delivery schedules.

When we restore deliveries using the Maintain Delivery Schedule Status option, “Test Agent 3” retains its enabled status once restored and becomes visible on the Monitor Deliveries page. The schedules of “Test Agent 1” and “Test Agent 2”, respectively enabled and disabled, remain unchanged (Figure 5).

Figure 5. The delivery schedules in the example instance after restoration using the "Maintain Delivery Schedule Status" option

When we restore deliveries using the Disable Delivery Schedules for New Deliveries option, the result is similar to the previous example, but “Test Agent 3” does not retain its enabled status (Figure 6).

Figure 6. The delivery schedules in the example instance after restoration using the "Disable Delivery Schedules for New Deliveries" option

When we restore deliveries using the Disable All Delivery Schedules And Delete All History option, all delivery schedules are disabled and any delivery history is deleted (Figure 7).

Figure 7. The delivery schedules in the example instance after restoration using the "Disable All Delivery Schedules And Delete All History" option

Conclusion

The enhanced Restore Deliveries options described in this article provide greater flexibility when restoring deliveries on your Oracle Analytics Cloud instances. Tasks that required manual handling or custom scripts for customers in the past are now simplified with this new feature, marking a significant step forward. I genuinely appreciate these kinds of improvement, and I’m looking forward to have them included in the next release of Oracle Analytics Server as well.