QlikView Overview

When I first started using QlikView 12 years ago, it was a small niche tool that could help you load your data from a variety of sources and build dazzling visualizations in a matter of hours or days. As an Application Director for a mid-size manufacturing company, I deployed my first QlikView dashboard in 3 weeks, with minimal investment, and that first achievement was called a "slam dunk" even by the most skeptical executives. This was in 2002, way before most of the tools and gadgets that we use today, ever existed. We used QlikView to analyze Sales, and then Profit Margins, and then Excess and Obsolete Inventories, and then transportation costs, and so on and so forth. within 5 years, QlikView become a valuable business tool on every desk in the company. Since then, the technology world around us had changed a lot - our computers are now using 64-bit operating systems, and a nifty laptop is now more powerful than the most powerful server back in the days. The capabilities of business software had changed as well. Today, QlikView is not a niche tool anymore, it's a flagman tool in the market of Data Discovery (Qlik likes to call the same term Business Discovery). However, the core value remains largely the same: With QlikView, we can load large amounts of data and build beautiful and insightful visualizations with an unmatched speed. Using the recent advances in technology, we can empower our users to navigate their data in the most liberating and powerful way. I won't be the first to state that modern companies collect, store and process vast amounts of data. BI tools are trying to help people make sense of that data, and QlikView is by far my favorite tool for this task. We think that we know our business. However, the "million dollar" question is what we don't know about our business? For me and many of my customers, QlikView has become an eye opener, in the way it helped companies realize how much they don't know about their business: - As a manufacturer, do you know what products are truly profitable and to what extent, considering all the customer programs, allowances, chargebacks etc? - Do you know what products in your inventory are turning fast and what products are sitting there for years? - Do you know your true service levels with your customers, and how they are trending in time, and what are the possible reasons might be? - Do you know if vendor payment terms are consistent across your corporation, or do you lose money on various unfavorable payment terms? - Do you know how your customers are paying you? Do they comply to your payment terms? Are you paying them chargebacks while they are being late on their commitments? - Do you know if your employees follow your travel policy, and how much does it cost you when they don't? All of those questions have one thing in common - if you don't know the answer, you are likely to be wasting money that could be saved. When things are getting tough, companies tend to resort to layoffs and tough decisions... With the help of QlikView and advanced business analytics, we can find money in a haystack of data and help companies get better without necessarily laying people off. There is a lot of money wasted in the process, and QlikView is an excellent tool that can help us find it, save it and put it back to work.
QlikView is extremely effective in its ETL capability. In comparison to Tableau and other modern tools, QlikView has the best data loading capabilities, making it extremely easy to load data from multiple disjointed data sources and build a cohesive data model that supports your needs. Flexibility. With QlikView, making changes to an existing application is extremely easy. Since we don't need to mess with multi-dimensional cubes, developing and changing data models and visualizations is easy and fast Quick learning curve. It's very easy to get educated and become proficient on QlikView. New developers become productive after just a few days, and then continue learning more advanced techniques while already delivering value to their companies.

Our shortlist included Tableau, a newer version of Microsoft's SSRS and Qlikview. We also knew what Micro Strategies and Business Objects had to offer from our experiences with them at other companies, and knew what we could afford. We eliminated them on price and the complexity of set-up. We liked QlikView's in memory, associative model, and self-service capability. With "in-memory", everything that gets consumed from a dashboard is loaded in memory so it is incredibly fast. Although Qlik touts its mobile distribution capabilities, that was not a huge differentiator for us, but is something we are now exploring. Microsoft and and BO do have in-memory capabilities now. The associative model is patented by QlikView. Basically it starts to understand the associations in your data, e.g. if A=B and B=C, then A=C. It means you can build a Qlikview model very quickly. In traditional data warehousing, you work with users and understand their requirements, refine the data model, start to physicalize it, tune it, build ETLs. It's a 3 month at best delivery cycle. That doesn’t work here at this company. Our business users will not wait for you. Our business is dynamic, we are launching new products all the time. Instead of going through an arduous process, you just load data into QlikView and build an associative model. It link things up. If it doesn’t work, you can change things very quickly. You don’t have to write data definitional language. Where you get into trouble, is if you load very large data sets into QlikView, memory not as abundant. They are releasing a tool called data explorer which allows you to do a hybrid approach – load some in memory and some in database. If data is going into frequently used dashboards it goes into memory. If infrequent access is required and the data set is very large, it makes sense to leave it in the database. We also have a company called DataRoket that builds connectors for us, e.g. load this relational data into QlikView. They have built adapters for QlikView-Hadoop integration.
Out of the box, the governance and meta data management is not great. You can buy another product for that. Out of the box, you can get yourself in trouble. We have solved for that through business process and workflow. They are still a bit tied too Microsoft tools like Internet Explorer. Working on Firefox, Chrome, Safari is not the same experience. We would really like them adapt. For example, when viewing a line graph with multiple points on graph, if you zoom over a point, it will light up the bubble in IE, but we cannot get it to work the same way in other browsers. Performance tuning explain plans don’t exist. Our ability to do custom Ajax development – we would like to put in a widget, where we can do an uptime call and have nothing else change. No documentation etc. Documentation is ok.