Book Image

QlikView for Developers

By : Miguel Angel Garcia, Barry Harmsen
Book Image

QlikView for Developers

By: Miguel Angel Garcia, Barry Harmsen

Overview of this book

QlikView is one of the most flexible and powerful Business Intelligence platforms around. If you want to build data into your organization, build it around QlikView. Don't get caught in the gap between data and knowledge – find out how QlikView can help you unlock insights and data potential with ease. Whether you're new to QlikView or want to get up to speed with the features and functionality of QlikView, this book starts at a basic level and delves more deeply to demonstrate how to make QlikView work for you, and make it meet the needs of your organization. Using a real-world use-case to highlight the extensive impact of effective business analytics, this book might well be your silver bullet for success. A superb hands-on guide to get you started by exploring the fundamentals of QlikView before learning how to successfully implement it, technically and strategically. You'll learn valuable tips, tricks, and insightful information on loading different types of data into QlikView, and how to model it effectively. You will also learn how to write useful scripts for QlikView to handle potentially complex data transformations in a way that is simple and elegant. From ensuring consistency and clarity in your data models, to techniques for managing expressions using variables, this book makes sure that your QlikView projects are organized in a way that's most productive for you and key stakeholders.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
QlikView for Developers
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Dimensional data modeling


We will first take a moment to review a little bit of theory, and even some history. If you are already familiar with dimensional modeling, feel free to skip to The associative data model section. Otherwise, read on to see how the data models used in transaction processing systems came to be, why these data models are hard to query, and how an alternative modeling technique solves these problems.

Note

This section is largely based on Ralph Kimball's article, A Dimensional Modeling Manifesto. The full version can be found at http://www.kimballgroup.com/1997/08/02/a-dimensional-modeling-manifesto/.

Back in the day

When computers first appeared on the scene, the methods for storing, retrieving, and modifying data were still in their infancy. For example, when storing a customer order, it was likely that all of the data from the paper order form was directly copied into a single record or file.

While it was convenient to have the data digitally available, people quickly...