First Signs of Life

The first signs that something was about to happen (or at least the first I noticed) was when Martin Mahler updated his LinkedIn employment title to CEO of VizLib. I dropped Martin a note, but he didn’t offer too much in way of explanation, and the website at VizLib.com simply had a “coming soon” placeholder. Things then started emerging, first on Twitter and then on their own website. One by one, three freely available extensions were released for Qlik Sense under the VizLib banner, I will look at each of these in a bit.

As the information for the Qlik Dev Group was made available as were the details of who VizLib were in their entirety. Martin had teamed up with David Alcebero and Adam Cooke, names I was familiar from Qlik Community and from Qlik themselves. Things were certainly starting to look very interesting.

The Extensions

The first extension that I saw from the VizLib stable was the TimeLine. This really is a demonstration of the art of the possible in Qlik Sense. With data loaded in giving details of starts, duration and media related to events a truly dynamic presentation of a timeline can be shown within Sense itself. Whilst I can’t see a use case where I will be embedding this into any of my clients’ analytics apps any time soon, it showcases the use of Sense as a portal for data presentation of any kind.

Full details and download here: https://www.vizlib.com/storytimeline/.

From here I then discovered the Advanced Text Object, and this is when I truly started to get excited. This one component delivers on everything that the QlikView text box does, with a few extras thrown in. All of the frustrations within Qlik Sense are removed, and my recently published blog post was rendered obsolete in an instant.

Colours based on functions, different fonts, borders and a large number of actions (looking suspiciously like the QlikView list of actions) are all present and correct. Something that is missing on native Sense objects is the dynamic show/hide, not so with VizLib objects that’s here also. The tool-tip functionality (to show a custom text box on mouse-over of a text object) adds even more possibilities. The huge number of properties that can be set in the accordion give a developer whatever they could possibly need.

Full details and download here: https://www.vizlib.com/advancedtextobject/

Finally, on the day of the Dev Group itself I spotted the final extension that is available as at now, the VizLib scatter chart. One of the frustrations that I have with Qlik Sense is that functionality that I have grown to use frequently in QlikView is simply not there out of the box in Sense. Donald Farmer said at an early Dev Group (No. 3?) that the intention was that the API would be opened up so that anyone could create visualisations, and that has certainly happened. This doesn’t mean you can find anything you want though, and I took to Qlik Community to find how to replicate a chart I used in QlikView showing points transitioning from prior period to now (https://community.qlik.com/thread/208446), with no luck.

The VizLib Scatter chart takes that requirement and knocks it out of the park, delivering on the animated time charts of the late, great, Hans Rosling in the process.

Full details and download here: https://www.vizlib.com/scatterchart/

I’ve not put masses of detail and screenshots here, please go to the VizLib site to find out just what you can do with these extensions.

The London Dev Group

VizLib were the sponsors for the 10th London Qlik Dev Group (thanks for the pizza guys!), and therefore got to set their stall out at the start of the evening. There was a definite sense of appreciation as they outlined their core values (easy to use, highly customisable and supported) and demonstrated some of their wares. The “customisable” I have already touched on above, with the accordion options, but it is the “supported” that I think is crucial here. There are already many extensions out there, offering various bits of functionality, but it is a risk to use any of them – what happens when Sense is updated, will that extension you downloaded still work? Businesses need to know the business critical apps they create are supported at all levels.

Obviously that support is going to come at a cost, and whilst no details are available at this time, it appears that this is going to be done on a subscription based model to the entire suite of VizLib visualisations. This suite is going to be one that is expanded in time, and already teasers are up on Twitter.

It will be interesting to see what price point access to these additional extensions will come at. From my experience though, it is much easier to get sign off for a larger spend than a smaller one in some enterprises. This is something I have seen Easy Qlik QViewer be a victim of, with users simply not being able to get a spend that small through purchasing, so end up buying a personal copy to use at work. This is something I hope that VizLib pitch just right, not just because I wish Martin, David and Adam all the best with this venture, but also because I want to see the Qlik platform continue to grow and outshine other BI Leaders. It is only with the realisation of the vision of the open API that the platform can truly reach it’s potential.

Also of note in the presentation was the mention of two heavyweight collaborators with VizLib, in the form of Websy and Ralf Becher, both of whom already have some excellent extensions on Branch. This willingness to collaborate and innovate will surely also serve VizLib well.

Later on in the evening it was Qlik’s turn to enlighten the group on where they are seeing things going with their product set. The good news is that with the platform and foundations firmly in place there are going to be improvements that will allow Qlik, to create new visualisations and integrate them into the product quicker. This means that we should be seeing more visualisation functionality in the core product soon. Whilst on one hand it looks like they are now going to be playing catch up with other providers, I think that having a well featured base product is crucial to Sense’s continued success. When we introduce Sense to prospective new clients, saying we can make it do what they want only if they bolt on a bit extra off of the Internet is not that strong a sales message. Third party extensions should be there for the people who want to take things to another level, not just those who want to emulate what they can do in QlikView. Hopefully VizLib and others can blaze the trail, and show Qlik what they should be baking into Sense out of the box (trend line through a bar chart, anyone?).

After the room cleared out, it was time for me to continue to do research for this blog post, over a couple of cold ones at the Flight Club on the City Road. Among those who joined us, including all three VizLib founders, there was a real sense that things are really going to take off from here.

I for one am looking forward to seeing it unfold.

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The complete list of Qlik Luminaries for 2017 have been announced today on the Qlik Blog, in a post you can read here: https://global.qlik.com/us/blog/posts/mark-bilotta/the-qlik-luminary-class-of-2017-shines-brighter-than-ever

There are some people on the list who will be familiar to anyone who contributes to discussions on the Qlik Community, or who keeps up with some of the excellent blogs that are now available on Qlik topics.

Great to see some new faces on the list, returning stars, good friends and people who are really pushing the boundaries with the Sense APIs. (You know who you all are…). Pleased to see Aaron Couron make the list this year, as he has been a blogging machine recently.

Our very own blog aggregator, AskQV.com, is making it easier for you to interact with this year’s Luminaries – with an update to it’s Twitter list of Luminaries. Look out for a new feature on the site soon, that will allow you to filter out just the blogs written by Luminaries.

It’s a pleasure and a privilege to once again be listed among these great people.

Please join me in congratulating those who made the list.

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QViewer Overview

If you have not previously used QViewer, but you have created or consumed a QVD file, then you have been missing out. Prior to this product being available the only way to interrogate the data within a QVD file was to create a temporary QlikView app, load the file and view it there. There is merit in this approach, as you get to use the associative engine and Qlik objects (you may even add our data profiler), but often it is overkill for a simple file.

You may, or may not, be aware that there is a lot of meta data stored within each QVD you create, as this can be viewed in QlikView or Qlik Sense by loading from the XML header, as described in a previous blog post. Again though, this means creating a separate file that needs to be deleted after use, and takes a short while to build.

Enter QViewer, this small utility (the installer zip is only 742KB) is associated with QVD files, allowing you to simply double click them to open them. A full table view of the data is then given, with the ability to get distinct lists of column values (like a Qlik List Box) and menu items for getting to the meta data and lineage information. All data sources that have fed into a QVD’s creation are listed, as is a link directly to the QVW file that created it.

The New Features

As the product that already did everything that it said on the tin, it is good to see that there is much that is the same between this new version and it’s predecessor. All the menu items are in the same place and the UI is familiar.

The first change you will probably notice is the Most Recently Used list on the start screen. Whilst not revolutionary, this is a nice addition:

Once you open a file though things get more interesting. Nestled among the familiar menu items is a new button, Find.

Whilst you could previously seek for a value in a specific column, you needed to know which column to look in. This new find dialog searches across all columns at once. Also, in the previous version, when a value was found it was still shown in the midst of all other data, in the new version the data is filtered showing only matching rows:

Note also the Sense style selection bar along the top, showing which search has been made to give you the rows you are seeing. This is a neat way to track and remove selections, which leads me on to what happens when you double click on a cell.

Qlik style selections are made, with columns that are currently filtered being highlighted in blue. Selections can be removed by clicking the X in the selection bar, or by double clicking the header, here selections can be removed or modified.

This ability to filter data makes the need to load the QVD into Sense or QlikView less likely for many tasks, speeding up simple data interrogation and development time.

Other Improvements

As well as the major updates there are a number of other tweaks I have been noticing whilst using the tool. The list box type view of fields now has an indication of how many instances of each value have been removed as a result of selections – something that is not done in the Qlik products themselves natively. The feature that generates your load script for you (under the Table Metadata menu) now has a preview of the code before you copy it out, this saves you pasting code somewhere before realising it is not quite what you want.

I’m sure that there will be other things that I will notice as I get to spend more time with the new version also.

Something that I have not found, and would have been a nice addition, given the filtering options, is the ability to save out a filtered sub-set from the QVD. This is functionality which is core to EasyQlik’s other product EasyMorph. This tool gives a simple UI for data preparation, and is integrated as a jump off point from QViewer – this is a topic for another post though.

Final Words

As at now version QViewer 3.0 is still at beta, but in the time I have been putting it through its paces I have not spotted any issues. You may want to wait for the first full release before putting the new version into a production environment, but I would not expect to see issues.

There is a limited free version of the product, which loads only 100,000 rows. The software is not expensive, and there is an upgrade discount for people who have already purchased a licence for a previous version. Whilst the tool is still useful with the 100,000 row limit in place I would urge you to purchase a licence, as it would be great to see more future versions with more innovative and useful features included.

Thank you Dmitry for a great tool.

QViewer can be downloaded and purchased from https://easyqlik.com/.

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This post was written some time ago. Many of the connectors which required Qlik Web Connectors previously are now available out of the box in Qlik Sense Cloud.
The Qlik Web Connectors are still an essential add-on for getting to many data sources in Qlik Sense Client-Managed and QlikView.

Background

With the purchase and re-branding of QVSource there were bound to be some changes. Those of you familiar with the product will be pleased to hear that the functionality of the product remains the same, and the UI is very much like when I blogged about it on the release of the web version of QVSource. If you are not yet familiar with the product, this use case given in this post about connecting to a secure intranet page with QVSource should give you a good feel for why you may need this product.

So, where do the changes lie in the new version?

One of the neat features of QVSource, as it was, was that when you purchased any connector you got a number of extra connectors included and you also got the ability to test any beta connectors that were in development. The result of the move to Qlik is both good and bad, to give the bad news first – the beta connectors have been removed and at present it is not possible to get access to them. Hopefully this will change in future, perhaps with some closed NDA betas. Moving swiftly to the good news though, there is an expanded list of ‘Standard’ connectors, and these are available at no cost. Simply download the product from Qlik’s download site (here) and you can start using the Standard connectors straight away for free.

The rest of the post is focused on these Standard connectors, and what you can do with them.

Qlik Notification Connector

One of the frustrations I have had with Qlik Sense is that the QMC does not have the ability to send alerts on failures during reloads. This has been available in QlikView since before I started using it. Alerts are also not available out of the box yet.

It would appear that Qlik have decided to plug this gap by making the Qlik Notification Connector available as a Standard connector within Qlik Web Connectors. During the load script you can now send emails, via SMTP with dynamic content and with attachments. By coupling this with data written using the STORE statement powerful alerting is now possible from the load script, in both QlikView and Qlik Sense.

In order to plug the gap of the QMC not sending alerts, an app could be created which parses the load log files and then sends an email listing any failures that have occurred since the last run of the log parser via Qlik Web Connectors.

Qlik FTP/SFTP Connector

This could be a hugely useful connector in some scenarios, indeed we looked at implementing QVSource at a client purely for this functionality, and it is now included as a Standard connector. Using this connector data can be downloaded from a FTP site prior to it being loaded into QlikView or Qlik Sense, allowing for data to be loaded from even more sources. Data can also be uploaded as part of a load, perhaps shipping a QVD created on one server across to a different server to be used there.

As you would expect, the ability to specify passwords for both FTP and SFTP is present and correct.

Qlik Mailbox Connector

This connector allows you to issue POP3 and IMAP statements and have them run during your Qlik load script. You can download email messages and attachments and pull those into your Qlik application. Whilst it may not be practical or beneficial to load all of your emails into an application for analysis (or perhaps it is?) the connector does open up some opportunities.

By setting up a specific email account you can provide automation to your Qlik load script via email. Perhaps you have a monitoring tool which can raise alerts via email? Have this send alerts to an address your Qlik load script is watching and your Qlik app can display these alerts. Or perhaps you have an incremental load, but you want users to request full reloads at will, have the user send an email and when the Qlik load script spots the mail it can change from incremental to full reload.

There are, of course, many other possibilities of automation using email.

Qlik Dropbox and Google Drive Connectors

These two connectors allow you to authenticate and interact with two of the most common cloud storage providers. Both of the connectors allow you to download specified files from these providers to a location local to where the script is being run. This means files that have been placed in these secure stores can then be loaded into your QlikView app. Both also allow you to get lists of files in order to enumerate around files.

The DropBox connector also allows you to upload files to DropBox, and the Google Drive connector has some additional options around updating Google Spreadsheets from the load script – which could make it very useful.

Qlik Google Calendar Connector

This is one of the connectors that here at QI we use to drive our business. To give our consultants a simple way to log time they just enter information into Google Calendar. QlikView then picks up data from each of the calendars, via this connector, and then builds a complete list of what time has been spent and what needs to be billed on the back of it. Each of the components is very simple, but with the different parts working together an elegant solution can be produced.

If you are looking to build a similar app be wary of the way that the data from Google deals with events that span multiple days, as you will need to deal with this in your load script.

Final Notes

As well as the Standard connectors listed above, there are a couple more Standard connectors and a whole host of Premium connectors. These allow you to connect to many different on-line data sources including Google Analytics, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft Dynamics and Google Big Query. The premium connectors are licensed on a subscription basis and are available through the same channels as QlikView and Qlik Sense licences. Contact your Qlik partner or Qlik account manager for more details.

It is worth mentioning that if you are upgrading from QVSource to Qlik Web Connectors you will need to make some adjustments to your load scripts. This is mostly due to the old brand name of QVSource being removed from URLs and connector names. The version numbers on connectors are also being removed, which should make things simply moving forward. The changes required to the load script are documented in the Release notes for Qlik Web Connectors 2.0.0. Note that the subsequent release notes mention more recent changes, but are not as thorough in their description of upgrading from QVSource.

Annoyingly it is still required that you put Qlik Sense into ‘Legacy’ mode in order to use Qlik Web Connectors. The rationale behind this is that Sense has a library of connections which are managed and governed. The web connectors however tend to be most useful when parameters are passed into the URL. This is not allowed in Qlik Sense by default. Changes to settings are presently required to enable this functionality, but hopefully now it is a Qlik product something will change in Sense to allow this type of load to happen by default. The setting change is documented on the Qlik Web Connectors Help.

At Quick Intelligence we were big fans of QVSource and the work that Chris and Darren had done putting it all together (not to mention the legendary support). It is great to see the product is still in good health (even if it does have a new name) and that both Chris and Darren are both now on staff at Qlik – hopefully able to keep a watchful eye on their product.

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The Current Situation

At present any company who requires twenty five or fewer Named CALs and one hundred or fewer Document CALs can opt for the Small Business Server. This makes the cost of entry for QlikView quite reasonable. Organisations wanting to cluster, use ticketing, have more users or use Session CALs would need to go for the Enterprise Server.

This lower cost entry point for the server fitted perfectly with the ‘land and expand’ mantra that Qlik had for when sending their sales teams and partners out selling. It is a solution that fits many of our clients very well – some of whom don’t have more than twenty five staff so will never need any more licences than will fit on a Small Business Server.

So, Why The Change?

The knee-jerk response to this news is that Qlik are getting greedy here, and hiking the price in order to extract more money from new customers. With the company being increasingly ‘large enterprise’ focused over the past few years there is going to be a little truth in this.

However, I believe that the move is more driven by the desire to get more customers, particularly smaller ones, using Sense. With there being no cost to Qlik Sense Server, and a relatively small minimum order quantity on Sense Tokens, there is a much lower cost of entry with Sense.

This is then better for everyone, as new users get to use the latest and best software, at a price point that is attractive. However…

The QlikView vs. Qlik Sense Dilemma

There is much being written at the moment, on this blog and elsewhere, about the relative merits of Qlik Sense vs QlikView. It is clear that Sense is the more modern tool, is getting the flashest new features and is where future direction lies. The problem is that there are some things that QlikView can do that Sense is just not quite there with yet (that is without having to plug gaps by using QlikMarket apps).

If you are not constrained, however, by preconceptions of what you should be able to build from what you have done previously in QlikView, then Qlik Sense is in many cases the better option.

Getting The Right Mix

The challenge is getting the right mix between Self Service for non technical users and the creation of complex analytics by those who are skilled enough to create them.

With QlikView Small Business Server not being an option for new clients from next month, a good mix for some companies may be to have QlikView Desktop licences for those analysts who need to build highly customisable apps to dig deep into data. These can then be used as the template to build similar apps in Sense (for distribution via the Server) which benefit from the fresh and responsive UI and design.

The way that the back end and script is shared between the two products makes this a potentially sensible move, and one that we will most likely promote to prospective clients.

Where To From Here?

Obviously we will need to wait for the July price list to arrive to see if this change does materialise. There may be other changes also that affect what can be offered to new clients. I will update in the comments as things progress.

I would be very interested in hearing other peoples opinion on the subject, so please do comment below.

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Qlik Acquired

There are a number of sources reporting the purchase of Qlik by Thoma Bravo for $3.0 billion. Most of them at present simply quoting from the press release that has been issued.

A few of these sources can be found here:

Business Wire
Wall Street Journal
Bloomberg
Fortune
Qlik

From what has been said so far, it would appear that this is going to be as near to situation normal as we as a developer community could hope for, with the same management team and head office location remaining in place.

For those who have invested in shares in Qlik, today is a very good day, as they can expect a windfall on their shares as a result of the acquisition.

What Does This Mean For QlikView and Qlik Sense?

As far as I can see, this can only be a positive announcement for users and integrators of Qlik products. The acquisition would appear to be welcomed by Qlik management, and Lars Björk has said that this acquisition will allow Qlik the flexibility to execute their strategic plan.

So, hopefully the injection of funds into the business will accelerate the development of the platform and mean that we can expect to see great new features in Qlik Sense 3.0 and beyond.

The hottest topic in the Qlik space at the moment is definitely the positioning of QlikView vs Qlik Sense, and it will remain to be seen whether anything will change on this front. It would be nice to see the investment giving Qlik the flexibility to truly deliver on the two product strategy it talked about – but this remains to be seen.

Looking at the roster of companies that Thoma Bravo have already invested in, they certainly seem to have an active interest in companies that are pushing new technology and have innovative solutions. This can only be a positive thing, as I see it.

Given the fact that there have been rumblings about companies that already have their own BI products purchasing Qlik, it is a relief that the purchase has instead come from someone who is not going to look to integrate features of Qlik Sense and QlikView into their own product range and then retire the products. This has been a concern since the IPO, and today will hopefully mean the chances of that happening are significantly reduced.

And Where To From Here?

Obviously this is still breaking news as I write, so it is far too early to talk about what changes it will bring about. I will add to the comments on this post as new information comes to light. I would also welcome you to add your thoughts and any further information on the topic below also.

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This year I am very pleased to be among their number. As Qlik Luminaries we are expected to share our experiences of QlikView and Qlik Sense and encourage others. You can be sure that I will be continuing to do this, through this blog, elsewhere online and directly with the customers I deal with day to day.

Congratulations to everyone who made the list this year, I look forward to catching up with some of you at a Qlik Luminary event soon. Also, thanks to the selection panel who put together this year’s list.

For a complete list of this years Qlik Luminaries, and to find out a little bit about them, please see the Qlik Luminary list on the Qlik Site.

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Creating Stunning Dashboards with QlikView

The first out of the gates, released at the end of October is this book by Julián Villafuerte. This book comes at QlikView from a UI angle and has a number of short, sharp and useful tips and tricks to spruce up your presentation. Many different chart types and techniques are covered, and not just from a ‘how to’ point of view, there is also guidance on when and why to use each chart type. I am appreciating this book from my first look at it, as it picks up on two things readers of this blog know I subscribe to; firstly that small details matter and also that text boxes are perhaps the most flexible data presentation object in your kit-bag. I’m looking forward to reading this book from cover to cover at some point soon. As Bill Lay mentions in his foreword, some people see the sole purpose of a QlikView app as delivering the correct numbers, but it is only good design that can really sell those numbers and bring clarity to them.

If you are yet to be convinced of this fact you should get this book.

QlikView Unlocked

Just arrived is this book by Roger Stone and Andrew Dove. This book gets big kudos from me, for mentioning our own AskQV site in the preface (thanks guys!). Like the previously mentioned Dashboards book, this one is a collection of bite-size tips, that you can dip into and just pick out bits that look interesting to you. That said though there is a logical flow through the book, from planning a deployment, setting up the environment, through building stuff to making sure you have tidied up at the end. In fact, it is the softer topics, such as the aforementioned preparation and planning, that set this book apart.

Most of the sections are not things that are particularly tricky, but aimed at relatively seasoned developers it picks up on lots of things that even they may be surprised to learn. Flicking through this book I can see nothing but good advice, and sections addressing problems I frequently come across when picking up other peoples code on client site.

Even if you think you are on the top of your QlikView game, I suspect you will learn more from this book.

Qlik Sense Cookbook

The most recent Qlik book to be published at the time of writing (I notice there is another scheduled for December) is this one by Philip Hand and Neeraj Kharpate. I have a slight bias with this title, as it is the fifth that I have been technical reviewer on, and the first I have been given the honour of writing the foreword for.

As I say in my foreword, the past year and a half has been a roller coaster ride for those close to Qlik and it’s products. New features and functionality just keep coming, and Sense just keeps getting better. This book is the first dedicated to getting under the bonnet of the new tool (the previous Learning Qlik Sense focuses more on positioning the product and giving an overview of features). The cookbook style (which readers of Stephen Redmond’s QlikView equivalent will find familiar) means that many of the ‘recipes’ have code blocks that can simply be copied and pasted into Sense to make the examples work. Each exercise in the book demonstrates another facet of Sense. There are recipes for creating extensions, using the “single object configurator”, Snapshots and Stories, as well as the more run-of-the-mill use cases. Producing a book on a product that is evolving as quickly as Sense was always going to be a challenge, and you will find a chapter at the end of this book dealing exclusively with features that arrived with version 2.1.1.

If you have come from a QlikView background, and are finding Sense a bit disorientating, or you have just turned up to the Qlik party since Sense arrived, then there will be recipes for you in these pages.

Conclusion

It is important, I feel, that we all should strive to keep learning. This is particularly important in the tech field, where things can change so rapidly. With no official printed manual to accompany QlikView, before the arrival of QlikView 11 For Developers late in 2012, there were no decent text books to help guide those implementing solutions with QlikView. Since then however, the number of titles available has grown and every facet of QlikView and Qlik Sense development and deployment is covered.

Whilst you can get lots of information from Qlik Community and blogs, like this one, there is something good about sitting down with a physical book. The depth and breadth that topics can be covered in tends to be greater with a book also.

Isn’t it time you filled your bookshelf up a bit more?

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An Impressive Team

Oleg Troyansky is one of the names that I recall being associated with many of the helpful posts on Qlik Community when I first started with QlikView, several years ago. He is still active on that forum, and now also associated with the Masters Summit and authors his own blog. Certainly someone with the pedigree to author a great book on QlikView. Co-authors Tammy Gibson and Charlie Leichweis also bring years of QlikView and management experience to the table.

In addition to the authors; the roster of individuals involved in the book is supremely impressive. The foreword is by none other than the CEO of Qlik himself, Lars Bjork. The technical editors are Qlik legends Rob Wunderlich (another name from my early days on the Community) and one of QlikTech’s first employees Henric Cronström. Now, I am always really pleased when I get a positive comment from Henric on one of my blog posts – I don’t think I would dare invite someone with that level of knowledge to critique my pieces though. Credit to Oleg for getting him on board.

A Refreshing Approach

The book references in it’s introduction the need for a Qlik consultant to wear multiple hats, this is something that I firmly agree with and covered years ago in a blog post on What Makes A QlikView Developer. Not only does the book reference this ability to span different disciplines, it puts it at the very heart of the content. Rather than being a straight technical reference book that teaches you how to use QlikView, it puts forward business scenarios and then identifies what types of visualisations are required to support those scenarios. From this it breaks down what measures should be considered, before going on to explain how these can be obtained using the toolset.

Even if your role doesn’t require you to get your hands dirty building load scripts or data models there is content that will be useful to advise you what you should get your BI team to build for you and your business. The handy three track guide at the start of the book, guiding the reader to the appropriate content, is a useful feature.

It Makes Sense

Given that the book is business requirement led, and the solution follows on, it makes sense that the method of delivery is secondary. This means that descriptions of how to deliver on the requirements is given in both QlikView and Qlik Sense. Seeing both products presented side by side in this way is great for anyone evaluating the two products, or choosing which is the best for a particular use case. There are also two chapters dedicated to the new kid on the block at the end of the book.

With the the frequent addition of new features, and the moving about of some of the old features, it is inevitable that some of the Sense content (particularly the screen shots) don’t match up to the latest version. This shouldn’t put you off though – the core functionality of the product has not fundamentally changed.

Using Your RAG

It is nice to see that even the print version of the book is in full colour. This is used to add clarity to the content, but also lifts the presentation. It is appropriate, perhaps, that a book about KPIs and dashboards uses a RAG colouring; Red for Warnings, Amber for Notes and Green for GO and do an exercise. Blue call out boxes contain summary information, and grey ones contain content that not everyone need read (for example terms that will be obvious to most, but not all, readers).

The colour also indicates the attention to detail that has gone into this book. Code examples have been given syntax highlighting that mirrors that which is found in the product itself. This must have taken ages to get right, and if that level of attention has gone into such a small detail you kind of trust the content itself has had that kind of attention.

Simply put, this book is a pleasure to flick through (for a Qlik nerd like myself it is anyway).

Conclusion

You have probably already worked out that I think this is a book that you should own. The requirement first approach is a useful one, and is a good reminder that all BI development should be done that way. Whilst no book can cover everything there are enough features and techniques referenced in here for it to be really useful. Topics like Data Modelling, QVD layers and Set Analysis are in there, alongside ‘softer’ things like selection of which visualisation to go for.

If you are looking for a quick route to getting started as a developer, and you only want to buy one book, this may not be the book you require. If you want to get under the skin of some more complex functionality in QlikView then the exceptional level of detail given on some topics in QlikView Your Business are well worth spending the time on (I was particularly impressed with the section on AGGR). Alternatively, if you are BI team leader or manager who wants to know a bit more of the why you should do things, and not just the how, then this book is also ideal.

Congratulations to Oleg and the team behind the book for adding another valuable resource to the Qlik ecosystem.

QlikView Your Business is published by Wiley. For more details, and links to purchase the book, please see Oleg’s own blog:
https://www.naturalsynergies.com/qlikview-your-business/

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Background

UPDATE: QVSource is now an official Qlik product – Qlik Web Connectors.

QVSource is the de-facto way of connecting to data sources that natively QlikView and Qlik Sense can not handle. The product has it’s genesis with social feeds, such as Twitter and Facebook, but can connect to many data sources including on-line databases and on-line storage (such as Google Drive). With connectors for open JSON/XML/SOAP APIs the list of sources is opened up much further. As well as strong software, QVSource scores high with legendary technical support from the developers – who are always amenable to getting the product to work for their customers, regardless of the data source.

Given this I was intrigued when I heard the product was being upgraded to a web version, and very happy to be contacted as one of the beta testers. In this blog post I give my first impressions of the forthcoming version.

Installation

As with the previous version of QVSource installation was a simple affair, simply opening a zip file and copying the files to the required location. Right clicking the .EXE and running as administrator was all that was needed to get things running. A small window pops up containing a link to the configuration site (on a new port on the localhost machine) and we are then in the web configuration page.

From here on in pretty much all settings are done in the browser. Given that this is the way that Qlik Sense operates for building applications it is fitting that QVSource now operates in a web environment.

The thing I wanted to test out first was putting QVSource Web Edition on a different machine to my Qlik development box and do everything remotely. To this end I ignored the pre-requisites and installed on an old Vista Home laptop (so far no problems seem to have arisen from this). In order to make things accessible from other machines a small tweak was required to the config file in the installation folder. This is documented in the QVSource Web Edition settings page itself so was easy to find the file to modify. Similarly adding the trusted remote IPs and allowed host names was a cinch.

Licencing is done in a similar way to the previous version, uploading the licence file after entering the provided key. As you would expect this is also done via the web interface.

With this done everything else can be done from the other nominated machines on the network.

A Fresh New Interface

What I was intending to do to test the new web version was to connect to it from another machine and refresh an existing document, doing all of the configuration remotely. The application is one that monitors time spent by our support desk staff, pulling data from Google Calendar. The how-to explained as far as the Qlik load script code was concerned the only change was to the server name (from Localhost to the machine name now hosting QVSource Web Edition). With this change made I set about making the QVSource configuration changes.

The configuration page appeared when referenced from a remote machine exactly as it had when referred to as LocalHost on the machine it is running on (thanks to the allowed IP address and host name being configured previously). On the front page I was presented with a number of links, some of which will feel immediately familiar to users of the previous version:

Here are the Settings and Licence options, which I used on the host machine to configure it. There are also links to Support and Change Log here. One of the nicest things about the new QVSource interface is that everything is to hand where you want it. As the configuration screens are browser based it feels like a natural extension of the config to go off to the (incredibly helpful and detailed) wiki pages, which give you all the information you need on configuring connectors. Similarly, the results of the last extract or connection logs are all close to hand through the links at the top of the page.

The Connectors button shows you how many connectors you have available, and clicking on it brings up a list of them. They are split into licensed connectors and Beta ones. Clicking on a connector allows you to configure it.

Here are the options for the Google Calendar connector:

From here you can pick which table you wish to load from. As with many of the connectors you need to pull from one (here Calendar List) in order to find a parameter for another (Events). On attempting to get a list of calendars QVSource realised it wasn’t authenticated to pull information from Google, so prompted for an authentication key:

As you can see from the image, there is a button to go off to the authentication page and helpful text to guide you to ensuring you authenticate correctly. All the way through using the product you get the feeling that someone has put thought into exactly what information someone is going to need to complete the task in hand. Once the authentication code has been obtained it can be copied and pasted and applied to the QVSource settings:

Once authenticated with Google, tabs are shown with the legends Data, QlikView and Qlik Sense. As with the non-web version you get a sample of data, and the load script code that is to be copied and pasted directly into a QlikView or Qlik Sense document. The data view is clear and just what you need to confirm you have got your extract right – it may even be all you need if you are just looking for a parameter to pass on to another query.

As with the Desktop version, I would like to see a link here to download the data in the preview – perhaps as a CSV or a QVX file. It may be that in some cases, where things are decoupled for whatever reason, that having the download to QVX is what you need rather than a load script. Hopefully this link may appear in a future release.

Talking of the load script, this is available in QlikView and Qlik Sense flavours on the next two tabs:

Once again here you can see the helpful guidance given by the tool as to how to use what you are given.

All in all, from downloading the beta zip file to being in a position to populate my QlikView app from QVSource Web Edition across the network, the whole process was complete in well under an hour. A painless upgrade.

Final Thoughts

With the change made to the load script, and our connector now authenticated on the QVSource site, it was simply a case of clicking the reload button in QlikView and the data refreshed without issue. As this is beta software I was concious that I may be fiddling around for a while to make things work, but actually it was quite the opposite. Rather than the web interface confusing matters it actually provided good sign posts as to what needed to be done. The simple functionality of the old version is still there, just made more accessible.

Being able to get to a web config page is going to simplify for us from a support stand-point for our clients who use QVSource. Where currently we have to RDP onto the box where the QVSource service is running to make any config tweaks or generate new scripts, we will be able to simply connect to the required VPN and use the web interface. This is a step saved, and often a lot of hassle avoided where the default limit of two connected users to a Windows Server has been met.

As everything seems to be going mobile these days, I also tested the Web interface on my Android tablet. I’m pleased to report that this worked fine also:

Not that I can see anyone setting up connections to new data sources in the back of a taxi between meetings (to pinch a Qlik example about where Sense could be used) it is still good to know the product is moving with the times. With Sense now having the ability to create apps from scratch in the browser alone it makes sense that data connections for these apps can also be created in the same browser.

With no issues being apparent in my usage of this beta version so far, hopefully QVSource Web Edition will be generally available in the not too distant future.

Many thanks to Industrial Codebox for giving me a copy of the beta to try, and allowing me to publish this review.

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