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September 1, 2003

Query, Reporting, and Analysis

A Quick Alternative

Small BI Player Competes Against Microsoft With Non-Warehouse-Based Analysis Tool

by David McAmis

Continued from Page 1

The objects within QlikView can be dropped onto a sheet, resized, and formatted. Objects include built-in features such as drill-down and filtering that let end users easily create their own interfaces or dashboards. The real key to return on investment with QlikView would come from providing analytic data in well-structured tables and views, and then turning end users loose to create their own custom analytic applications using the prebuilt components (see Figure 1).

For distributing QlikView documents, print and export facilities offer basic printing and export to text, HTML, XML, and a limited number of image formats. While the basic print and export functions are there, it would be nice to see export to PDF or, given the visual nature of the information presented, export integration with PowerPoint for management presentations.

Developer's Delight

Developers should also feel at home, as each of the objects (tables and charts,for example) has several basic and advanced properties you can use to control the object's behavior, format, and appearance. You can quickly create multipage analytic applications without a lot of coding.

But if you do need to write custom scripts, the real power behind the QlikView interface is the ability to use these objects with VBScript or JavaScript to create analytic applications. Although scripting may be a little out of reach for most end users, developers can use the tools QlikView provides to quickly create complex analytic applications (see Figure 2).

While other BI vendors may offer scripting in their analytic tools, QlikView goes beyond simple scripting to add support for events. You can tie scripts to events, such as a document loading, a user clicking a button or selecting a specific field, or a variable value changing. Developers experienced with either VBScript or JavaScript should have no problem picking up on the QlikView object model and operators.

In addition to QlikView Enterprise, there are two other versions. The Professional Edition can be used by "power users" to modify existing applications. The Analyzer Edition is for users who just want to view QlikView applications. For delivering QlikView documents over the Web, use the QlikView Server product. The pricing of these different versions is such that you would buy only a few licenses of the Enterprise version for developers and then buy one of the "cut down" versions for end-users to view applications.

From Simple To Complex

If there's one area where QlikView could use some improvement, it would have to be in making the user interface easier for new users. The wizards walk you through tasks, but it would be nice to see a "getting started" wizard for end users that would walk you through connecting to a data source, setting up your document, and so on. Even without this help, it's easy enough to look at the help file to find out how to create an "edit" script to connect to your data source. But it would be nice to be walked through this process.

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In all, QlikView Enterprise 6.0 is a solid product that offers end users and developers a rich set of tools for creating analytic applications. End users will enjoy the simplicity of dragging and dropping predefined components, while developers will be able to use the advanced properties and scripting to tackle even complex analytic applications.

David McAmis [dmcamis@hotmail.com] is an IT consultant, journalist, author, broadcaster, and expert in business intelligence who lives and works in Sydney, Australia.