Why QlikView/QlikTech is the Fastest

Growing BI Company in the World

By Neil Hepburn (Dir. of Education, IRMAC)

This presentation by IRMAC is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at wikipedia.org.

Speaker Bio

Information Management practice consultant for PwC Canada (PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP), specializing in Agile Analytics
and Data Quality

20 years experience in IS/IT, both in full time and external consulting capacities with a focus on Data Management over past
7 years
Have worked for very large Fortune 500 organizations as well as small start-ups and mid sized companies across
numerous industries

Education:
Honours Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo
Certified Data Management Professional (Mastery Level)

PMI Certified (CAPM)

Director of Education for IRMAC (Toronto chapter of DAMA-I)

Advised Wall Street equity analyst on technology company, prior to IPO in 2010

Routinely involved with small companies and not-for-profits in spare time:

GM of marketing for: Innovative iPhone App for Internet Radio Discovery
Data architect for Institute of Bioforest Technology

Neil Hepburn

Presentation Roadmap
A brief history of QlikTech
How Traditional BI works
How QlikView works
What is Agile BI/Agile Analytics

Demo of QlikView
How QlikView works internally?
Criticism of QlikView
Novel Features of QlikView
QlikView Competition
QlikView blindspots
What are the implications for OLAP and the data warehouse

Neil Hepburn

A Brief History of QlikTech

Founded in Lund, Sweden in 1993 by Bjrn Berg and Staffan Gestrelius originally as a
consultancy

Originally called QuikView as in Quality, Understanding, Interaction, Knowledge

Product was designed to mimic the way the brain works
A key aspect was the colour-coding scheme whereby selected values are highlighted in
green, linked values in white, and excluded values in highlighted grey
First two versions were basically written in Excel using VLOOKUPs
Hkan Wolg was later hired as lead software engineer to re-architect/re-write QlikView from
the ground up as an in-memory application
Renamed as QlikView in 1996
IPOed on Nasdaq in 2010 under symbol QLIK and had 7th best IPO of 2010
Now has over 24,000 customers in 100 countries and employs over 1,000 people worldwide
Market cap: $2.5 billion
Neil Hepburn

How Traditional BI tools works

Traditional OLAP/cube technologies primarily provide the ability to drill up and down through
dimension hierarchies, allowing the end-user to see pre-aggregated measures
Dimensions and measures must be know a priori
A small team is usually required to complete a BI project
A data warehouse or data mart is usually required as a pre-requisite before OLAP cubes can
be built
This can often lie on the critical path of other data warehouse projects. Since data
warehouse usage cannot be anticipated, a single version of the truth can often bog down
development
ETL is very slow to test, which in turn slows down development time
If a detail drill down report (e.g. to see all point-of-sale records), a drill through query link is
made to the operational data store to retrieve these data
Introduces another point-of-failure
Associations between dimensions are not computed only resulting measures (e.g. counts)
Neil Hepburn

How QlikView works (contd)

The secret sauce is: An experienced QlikView can build and test a dashboard solution
(including user acceptance testing) faster than any other BI tool I have evaluated
This makes Agile BI possible
Users and developers can remain focused on insights and outcomes
The resulting dashboards are effectively by-products of the analysis process
More flexible data model allows normalized data to be imported with fewer transformations
ETL development is in-memory. ETL jobs can be tested orders of magnitude faster than
traditional ETL tools
All data is automatically profiled on import
QlikView uses the word associative to distinguish itself from other BI vendors

Associative is a tricky concept to explain, but most people will get it when they see it
Associative puts emphasis on understanding how sets of data relate to one another
All those tricky SQL queries involving NOT EXISTS or LEFT/RIGHT OUTER JOIN are
but a mouse click away
Neil Hepburn

How QlikView Works

QlikView uses the word

associative to distinguish itself
from other BI vendors
Associative is a tricky concept to
explain, but most people will get
it when they see it
Associative puts emphasis on
understanding how sets of data
relate to one another
All those tricky SQL queries
involving NOT EXISTS or
LEFT/RIGHT OUTER JOIN are
but a mouse click away

Neil Hepburn

Traditional BI workflow

Neil Hepburn

QlikView workflow

Neil Hepburn

What is Agile BI/Agile Analytics

Fulfills the promise that Agile Software Development failed to

Very little software development is truly green field/blue sky

Functional requirements are inflexible

Once a shared data architecture is in place, impact analysis must be performed, breaking
the Agile methodology. Basically all Agile brings to the table is improved UX (User
Experience), since presentation layers are the only thing that can quickly be modified
without extensive impact analysis
Agile BI is not about software. Its about business insights and business outcomes
Dashboards are a by-product of Agile BI
Agile BI iterations are typically bi-daily, with a single Agile BI developer/analyst performing all
technical functions
A separate warehouse is not required, a single version of the truth, and other data quality
issues should not always be a roadblock
Occasionally specialized tools are required (e.g. fuzzy matching, cluster discovery, etc.)
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QlikView Demo Time

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How Does QlikView Work Internally? (Contd)

QlikView does not reveal the specifics of its inner workings. However, the following gives us
clues:
From Curt Monashs DBMS2 blog: The main ingredient of the performance secret sauce
in QlikView is that selections are compiled straight into machine code. (QlikTech gave
me the impression that this post is the first time that will be publicly revealed.)
We can also look at their main patent, with Hkan Wolg listed as the inventor. This is the
first part of their first, and most important claim. Note, the final multi-dimensional cube

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How Does QlikView Work Internally?

At the centre of QlikView is a large Multi-Dimensional Cube Table, with one column for
each table, and each row containing pointers back to the original tables row index
Also uses a: Global Symbol Table; Value Tables; and Data Tables
The machine code most likely refers to bitmap indexes. QlikView heavily relies on bitmap
indexes to perform its JOINs
QlikView may have the best known solution to Kimballs Big JOIN problem (JOINing a
billion dimensions with a trillion facts), since a single row is effectively being represented by a
single bit
Consider that a 64 rows can be JOINed in less than a clock cycle
Intel and AMD now support Active Vector Extensions (AVX), which will allow 256 rows to
be JOINed in less than a clock cycle
Unclear if this architecture lends itself to map/reduce
The embedded example shows in detail how the indexes work
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Criticism of QlikView

QlikView is the biggest threat to established BI vendors. Not surprisingly, there is more criticism directed
to QlikView than any other product.
Some criticism is valid, but most of it either misunderstands the product or distorts the truth
Criticism #1: You cant fit very much data in memory
Used to be true. When when 32-bit OSes were the norm, upper limit of 20 GB uncompressed data
Now I can buy an HP Integrity Superdome 2 /w 4 TB RAM, and load 40 TB of uncompressed data
about a years worth of call-detail-record data for a major Canadian telecom
Criticism #2: QlikView forces you to rename foreign and/or primary key columns to be the same
This is true, QlikView relies on Natural Joins. This is what you what you want as it leads to a more
intuitive [or Natural] user experience. The effort to rename columns is negligible
Criticism #3: QlikView stores data in proprietary files
QlikView now supports an open QVX format with a published spec and SDK
Third party tools (e.g. Expressor an ETL tool) integrate with the QVX format

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Novel Features of QlikView (3rd party visualization platform)

3rd party Visualization platform allows 3rd party
developers to develop custome extensions

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Novel Features of QlikView (3rd party visualization platform)

Associative Experience (already discussed)

Advanced Excel transformations. Allows quick prep of Excel data. E.g. filling in merged
cells
AND/NOT selections (as opposed to OR)
Semantic model support
Define relationship and inverse relationship. E.g. locale all predecessors and successors

Collaborative BI. Similar to two-way desktop sharing or Google Docs sharing.

Can be done through web browser with no client plug-in required.
Client-side data access
Can access and analyze Google Analytics data via client browser, simplifying security
Metadata can be imported and linked to attributes

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QlikView Competition

Only true competitor is Microsoft Power Pivot

Available as free plug-in for Excel 2010 and can be deployed in SharePoint 2010

Started as Project Gemini, which was announced 21 months in advanced the farthest out
for any MS project
MS has done their best to mimic QlikViews associative experience
Will now be rolling out Power View as part of SQLServer 2012 SSRS
Other vendors have greatly simplified the cube/OLAP approach, and can be considered
somewhat Agile, although they lack the Associative experience. Primarily:
Tableau
TIBCO SpotFire
Many vendors have jumped on the in memory bandwagon, but ultimately have just moved
their existing cubes in memory effectively just speeding up user interaction, but offering
nothing new in terms of user experience or development timelines
Some big data analytical DB vendors (e.g. SAP HANA) are feigning competition with
QlikView but none of these get to the last mile of user experience
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QlikView blindspots

Raw calculation engine has never been completely exposed

It is possible to integrate QlikView server objects into other web applications (e.g.
SharePoint)
It is also possible use client-side JavaScript to extract data from charts
However there is no pure data interface into QlikView, apart from the QVX interface, which
is not the same

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What are the implications for OLAP and the data

warehouse?

No longer need to maintain star schemas

The data warehouse is going through a transition, and will likely be much simpler to maintain
Bitemporal data types, which can already be found in TeraData and DB2, and have been
ratified in ISO SQL:2011 will handle all issues related to Slowly Changing Dimensions, and
other time related issues (e.g. when data was loaded vs. when original transaction occurred)
Change Data Capture tables should be used to load data warehouse

Data quality, de-duplication, and fuzzy matching should be treated as operational issues, e.g.
fuzzy matching tables should be maintained operationally
Dashboard schemas will be built in tools like QlikView, as needed.
Star and snowflake schemas are still useful, but should be built as needed on-the-fly

The data warehouse should more-or-less be a time invariant mirror of the ODS, and more-orless maintain itself

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