The differentiator for QlikView is in the associative, highly compressed data model that it forms when the built in ETL process happens. There’s no cubes or universes,or any other data plumbing. No fixed drill down paths. If the data you pull in,(from ODC or OLEDB structured DBs, or XML, or Excel spreadsheets, or charachter delimited files, or tables in a web page, or well, you get the idea) has 63 dimensions in it, they’re all available for drill down starting anywhere, ending anywhere, at the users’ whim.

If you avoid all the data plumbing infrastructure required by legacy OLAP and yet provide a far more easier, faster, more flexible and value BI application to end users, folks will beat a path to your door. They are today, at the rate of 10+ new companies a business day.

Think “in-memory” is limiting from a data volume standpoint? Think again. Not when coupled with an associative data model that highly compresses that data without losing any detail. In fact, most often with QlikView you’ll keep the transactional level of detail that you would have to give up in the summarized, aggregated world of traditional OLAP. Gartner says, in their just released magic quadrant, “QlikTech is able to show the most references analyzing hundreds of millions of rows of data with good query performance.”

As for anyone trying out QlikView themselves, you can here:

http://www.qliktech.com/Downloads.asp?id=2277

S.M.