QlikView Tutorial - What is Qlikview and its Architecture?

QlikView Tutorial for Beginners

In this QlikView tutorial you will learn QlikView from scratch and understand why it is such a transformational business discovery and data visualization tool. QlikView is extremely powerful when it comes to visually analyzing and drawing relationships from data. It performs in-memory data processing and generates powerful reports. QlikView can read from multiple sources of data including relational databases and flat files. It offers deep insights into the data for businesses and provides some powerful advanced analytical features as well.

Watch Qlikview Training for Beginners Tutorial

Recommended Audience

This QlikView tutorial is recommended to all those who want to learn QlikView basics and get ahead in their careers. Software developers, Business Intelligence professionals, business analysts, IT architects, data scientists and data analysts can benefit from this QlikView tutorial.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites to learn QlikView from this QlikView tutorial.

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What is QlikView?

First, let us compare QlikView with another business intelligence tool Tableau in this table:

QlikView is the top business intelligence tool used for converting raw data into knowledge. It is extensively used for consolidating, searching and visually analyzing data and converting it into valuable business insights. QlikView offers endless possibilities when it comes to using ad hoc queries and facilitating quick decision-making based on easily accessible information.

Why is QlikView so widely used?

QlikView is being deployed by organizations for deriving fast insights from data.  It brings a whole new level of analytical insights into the data stores with interfaces that are extremely user-friendly. QlikView finds the connection between data, relationships and also conducts direct and indirect searches across all data. 

QlikView is powered by in-memory computing technology. It is extremely fast and efficient thanks to its being able to overcome the limitations of the traditional disk and query-based BI tools. With QlikView, you don’t need to use multiple dashboards, reports, and analysis as it takes a consolidated approach. 

The user doesn’t require to stage the data or store it in intermediary formats like cubes and data warehouses thus allowing QlikView to pull data extremely fast. It efficiently integrates the back-end analytic engine with the front-end user interface. It also offers an associative search to help businesses view only the data that matters to them.

Features of QlikView

Here we list some of the top features of QlikView.

• It instantly manipulates the data sets using in-memory manipulations
• The hardware requirements are completely economical
• It has fast and powerful visualization capabilities
• Even non-technical users can work with ease with this tool
• It offers instant response and is highly scalable
• It offers unlimited dimensions and measures which makes it very flexible

Why should you learn QlikView?

QlikView is one of the best tools that are available for visualizing data and creating insightful reports, charts, and dashboards. Due to the sheer speed and simplicity with which QlikView accomplishes this, there is a huge interest from organizations to switch to QlikView from their traditional BI reporting tools. Due to this, the demand for qualified QlikView professionals is high with salaries on offer being the best in the business intelligence and analytics industry. All these reasons should be a motivation for you to learn QlikView and get ahead in your career.

Components of QlikView

Next in QlikView basic tutorial is its five key components and their roles & how they fit in the QlikView architecture:

• QlikView Desktop

QlikView Desktop is an integrated development environment used for data extractions and creating transformation models. It’s a Windows-based platform that enables you to perform data analytics, create GUI layouts, visualizations, and export them as reports. 

• QlikView Server

It’s a combination of QlikView web servers and applications that acts as a presentation layer between the end-users and servers. QlikView Server is used to host, manage, and distribute QlikView documents, reports, delimited files, and dashboards with proper data access and security. The server has an in-memory analytics engine and access points that allow it to connect with various data sources and get live feedback. 

• QlikView Publisher

QlikView Publisher is also a server-side application that closely works with QlikView Script and enables the users to perform two main functions:

• • Directly load the data into QVW files from various sources such as SAP Net, Informatica, SQL server, standard files, etc. 
  • Used to create tasks and trigger-based reloads for the QlikView application. 

• QlikView Management Console(QMC)

The management console has a web-based interface that centrally manages all the components of QlikView’s environment. Administrators use it to provide data access for various documents and deploy associative models on the server. 

• QlikView User Access

It’s a front-end component of the QlikView environment and provides various access points in the form of web-browsers. These access points enable the user to fetch the data from QlikView Server, run database queries, and perform other operations from a laptop, desktop, or mobile device. 

Also, learn about Qlik Sense from our blog on Qlik Sense Tutorial and clear your basics in this domain.

QlikView Architecture

The overall architecture of QlikView can be segregated into three main components:

• Front End

The front-end part of QlikView architecture entails all the applications, web-based programs, and software components used to interact with the data and Qlikview documents. The front end layer helps the user to access QlikView reports and connect live data sources with a simple drag and drop function. 

• Back End

Also known as the application platform, the back-end component consists of the QlikView developer and QlikView Publisher. It’s a place where the QlikView documents and other files are stored in various formats. Whenever you put a request to access or connect with any data source, it’s received by the application platform and the data is shared through QlikView Publisher. 

• Data Source End

The data source end is the data access layer that is used to perform the ETL(Extraction, Transformation, and Loading the data). It’s the fundamental layer that fetches the information from a myriad of data sources like SAP, Excel spreadsheets, Oracle, etc. 

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Advantages of QlikView

Next in order of QlikView beginner tutorial is the unique capabilities that this tool provides, which answers why they are preferred. Here are some of the advantages of using the QlikView tool:

• It instantly manipulates the data sets using in-memory manipulations.
• The hardware requirements are completely economical
• It has fast and powerful visualization capabilities.
• Even non-technical users can work easily with this tool
• It offers instant response and is highly scalable.
• It offers unlimited dimensions and measures which makes it very flexible.

Disadvantages of QlikView

Below are some of the disadvantages or drawbacks of using this tool:

• Not suitable for real-time data analysis as compared to other Business Intelligence tools
• The computer RAM sets a limit whenever you load heavy datasets. 
• The application development is too technical and requires scriptwriting in python and R programming languages.
• Compared to other tools like Power BI and tableau, QlikView seems to lack the latest feature and data analysis tools. 

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Applications of QlikView

Here in this section of the QlikView tutorial, we list some of the important applications of QlikView.

• Analyzing revenue data based on various filters for a large multinational corporation
• Creating a detailed visualization report based on social media response from customers segregated by location
• Taking decisions based on predicting the cause and effect with diagrams on top of historic data
• Blending data coming from disparate sources to visualize how a recent marketing campaign for a business is faring.

Hope this Qlikview tool tutorial was insightful for you. Do let us know in the comments below!

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