September 27, 2007

A negative take on QlikView

Apparently, one user isn’t happy with QlikView at all. The main problem seems to be, in effect, frequently-repeated bulk loads from disk into the in-memory structures. (Obviously — at least absent more information — that could be an artifact of a stupidly ignorant installation, rather than a fundamental problem with the technology itself.) He’s also not at all enamored of QlikView’s app dev tools.

Comments

2 Responses to “A negative take on QlikView”

  1. Anthony Deighton on September 27th, 2007 5:50 pm

    Curt– First let me say that I genuinely enjoy your blog, and think you have some interesting perspectives.

    QlikView is being adopted at a furious rate. Today (Sept 27th, 2007) we have just over 6200 customers globally, we’ve sold QlikView in 76 countries, and each day we add approximately 12 new customers. Customers are adopting QlikView because it offers a radically simpler, easier to use, less expensive approach to creating interactive visually compelling analytic experiences. Customers can build a QlikView in a few hours or days. And, anyone on the planet can try, by downloading a free copy from our website. I wonder why traditional OLAP providers don’t offer a free trial download… perhaps because they know no mortal could build anything useful with it in a reasonable number of months.

    As you point out in your post, in this hyper-growth there are bound to be a few customers who have hiccups. In the particular case you point out, the person posting was not a QlikView customer, but rather an integrator with limited experience with the product. I’ve taken the time to respond to his comments point by point, and you could consider linking to it.

    http://businessintelligence.ittoolbox.com/groups/vendor-selection/bi-select/qlikview-vs-olap-1631712

  2. Curt Monash on September 27th, 2007 6:09 pm

    Hi Anthony,

    I’m glad to see you’re back in the saddle!

    As for the link to your rebuttal — I think what you provided will do just fine. 🙂

    One quibble, however: Your comment that everybody has refresh issues isn’t totally to the point. If an entire database is being loaded into memory, then the initial load could indeed take longer (at least in theory) than just fetching a query result set. Your other comments to the effect that IN PRACTICE this isn’t a serious issue seem to me to be more relevant.

    By the way — are you sure the guy was a reseller himself? Sorting through his fractured grammar, it looked to me as if he’d gotten the product VIA a reseller.

    Best,

    CAM

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