Posted by Gilles on 02/02/2010 under Articles, News | 
I just received a link from William (@williamvanlith) through twitter (@gillespol) about Gartner’s Magic Quadrant 2010. I’ve been following Gartner’s magic quadrants on BI and datawarehousing for quite some time now and something struck me immediately. THERE ARE NO VISIONAIRIES ANYMORE!! Even Qlikview isn’t a visionary anymore. I consider that as a bad thing, it looks like nobody is really innovative anymore. This reflects some of the conclusions from Nigel Pendse in his BI Verdict. Another comment I’ve read at Jos van Dongen’s blog, is that it could mean that BI software is (finally) maturing. Read more of this article »
Posted by Gilles on 28/01/2010 under Articles, Nice Reads |
There is a very interesting interview with Nigel Pendse on the blog from Rittman Mead Consulting. Nigel Pendse is a business intelligence and OLAP analyst and the editor of The BI Verdict (formerly The OLAP Report) and author of The BI Survey (previously known as The OLAP Survey). The interview is about the BI tools market in general, but with a specific paragraph containing some good comments on Qlikview, in memory analysis and powerpivot. Nigels most important conclusions: Qlikview is blazing fast, easy to use and aimed towards the business user, but less useful in large enterprise deployments. Powerpivot is, according to Nigel, just a way to push upgrading to office 2010, the all new vertipaq in memory engine is very impressive and powerpivot isn’t able to handle very complex Analysis Services cubes. Read more of this article »
Posted by William on 04/01/2010 under How To |
The ABC-analysis (read more) is an often used method in logistics to divide the product collection in three different degrees, sorted on products with the highest revenue. This analysis gives valuable insights when removing (or adding) products from the collection. Products with low revenue could be considered for removal, cleaning up space in the warehouse for other products.
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Posted by Juan on 22/12/2009 under Articles, How To |
For a long time one of the hottest discussions in the BI arena has been the concept of Enterprise BI vs Departmental BI, Top-down approach vs Bottom-up, Pragmatism vs Idealism. In this corner we have Spreadmarts, spreading like a virus throughout the organization to provide a quick and dirty fix to the desperate need of end users for timely information out of IT databases…..and in the other corner we have multiyear, multimillion Enterprise Data Warehouse initiatives that focus first on creating infrastructure, BI governance committees, data integration, while end users keep waiting for the very much needed information.
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Posted by Gilles on 18/12/2009 under Nice Reads |
There is a nice and promising series at QlikviewGuru’s blog. He is busting myths like the mythbusters do on TV.
His first post in the series is about Qlikview being able (or not) to handle large datasets. You can read it here: QlikView Myths – “QlikView can’t handle large data sets”. It’s an interesting post because first of all he busts the myth and second he has two very good reasons why the myth still exists. But read it for your self.
His second post in the series is about the myth that Qlikview implementations do not require any consulting. As long as QlikView is sold as simple and quick, too many customers will make the connection to “quick and dirty”…is the ending quote QlikviewGuru uses. That’s a very true conclusion. Read the post here: QlikView requires no consulting.
I’m looking forward to the following myths the QlikviewGure will be busting. I do have some suggestions: Qlikview is cheap, Qlikview doesn’t require a datawarehouse or a data integration solution, Qlikview is your enterprise wide BI solution. Any other myths need to be busted?
Posted by William on 24/11/2009 under How To |
Qlikview creates associations between fields with the same name. Often the use of these fields is limited for the realisation of a descent datamodel. They will never be used by the dashboard designer in the front end. For this reason it’s nice to hide these fields. In order to do this, the first character of all key fields should be the same. In the Qlikview training it’s recommended to use the % sign for keyfields. (example: a keyfield with the name Key becomes %Key).
When all keyfields have a % sign for the first character, it’s easy to hide them in the front end by putting the following command in the END of the script:
SET HidePrefix = %;
When you reload the document and add a new listbox, you will notice the keyfields aren’t there anymore.
Posted by William on 20/11/2009 under How To |
In some situations IIS needs to do the webserver part. With Qlikview 9, the setup for such an environment slightly changed from previous versions. This how to explains to setup Qlikview 9 with IIS on a Windows 2003 machine.
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Posted by Gilles on 05/11/2009 under News |
Packt Publishing asked me to write a book review about their new book on Oracle Warehouse Builder. Allthough this book is not about Qlikview, you’ll often come accross oracle databases during your Qlikview projects. Since Oracle Warehouse Builder (an ETL tool) comes for free with the database it might come in handy sometimes to use OWB to create yourself an extra data layer from your source databases. This book is a beginnersguide to OWB etl and helps you from the installation of the database and your OWB software till your first deployment. You can read the review here: BOOK REVIEW: ORACLE WAREHOUSE BUILDER 11G – GETTING STARTED
Posted by William on 04/11/2009 under How To |
A common data mining method is Market Basket Analysis. This method checks what kind of items are being sold in combination with other products. It delivers insight in buying behavior which helps to make better deals and, for example, bargain discounts. A famous example discovered this way is the cross selling of beer and diapers in supermarkets. The reason: after the birth of a baby it’s often the father who is buying diapers. Because company know more about their customers trough the use of credit and customer cards, useful information is ready to pick up. The good news: it’s actually quite easy to implement this method in Qlikview.
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Posted by Gilles on 29/10/2009 under News |
Houten, 14 oktober 2009 – Architectuur- en integratiespecialist IT-eye introduceert Dink Intelligence: een bron van advies voor organisaties die effectief om willen gaan met informatie. Dink Intelligence ondersteunt ondernemingen bij het creëren van zowel business als competitive intelligence en zet projecten op om intelligence efficiënt te implementeren in het bedrijfsproces. Daardoor beschikken ondernemers op het juiste moment over waardevolle informatie om besluitvorming mee te ondersteunen. Read more of this article »
