Intelligent Enterprise

David Raab is a great fan and former reseller of QlikTech's QlikView. His recent lengthy post about the product (I hesitate to call it "detailed" only because he rightly observes that QlikTech is in fact stingy with technical detail) is positive enough to have been recommended by the company itself. Specifically, it was cited in the comment thread to my recent post on QlikTech, where David himself also addressed some of my questions.

But of course, no technology is perfect, not even one as great as David thinks QlikView is.

In particular, the idea that QlikView automagically gives you access to all your information, without any prior work, is refuted by David's comment from the link above:

Moving the data from its original source to the QVD format can be quite time-consuming for large volumes, so it is best to do it just once. Similarly, doing calculations and other data preparation in scripts and saving the results is often critical to producing quick response for end-users, since it minimizes the amount of time spent waiting for on-the-fly calculations. I haven't personally needed to build applications that reload from QVDs on-demand, but can easily envision situations where this would also be an important strategy to ensure adequate performance.

In fairness, QlikTech and its fans never claimed that deployment was instantaneous; rather, it takes a few weeks or months. Surely much of that time goes to exactly the kind of pre-massaging David describes.