PUT TO THE TEST: A New Generation Of Business intelligence - QlikView's innovative approach and simple concept come together to challenge standard business intelligence solutions

摘要

QlikView 7.0 is a business intelligence (BI) product with a unique, client-centric architecture and an innovative, list-based development approach. It lets users create lists that represent dimensions and measures, making it simple in concept, easy to deploy and use yet sufficiently powerful. It isn't quite ready for Web services environments or advanced metadata repositories, but its approach and architecture challenge the established methods of developing and deploying BI solutions. QlikView is remarkably easy to install. In no time, I had imported data from a SQL Server database, an Excel file and inline data entries. A range of data sources and files can be added through script files, using a combination script file editor and wizard. Data can be formatted and transformed during import. QlikView's data transformation capabilities are basic, but as I see it, BI and extract-transform-load (ETL) are two very different competencies; BI tools would be hard-pressed to provide both these competencies. Data sources can be viewed in the form of SQL-like scripts or via a Table Viewer that offers an entity-relationship-style display of the data structures.