Book Image

QlikView 11 for Developers

Book Image

QlikView 11 for Developers

Overview of this book

Business Intelligence technologies are a must-have in every business to make informed decisions and keep up-to speed with the ever-evolving markets. QlikView's disruptive technology makes it a key player and leader in the industry; with its flexibility and powerful analytics environment, building QlikView apps can be mastered by both, business users as well as developers. This book will help you learn QlikView Development from a basic to a practitioner level using a step-by-step approach in a practical environment, and apply proven best practices on each topic. Throughout the book, we will build a QlikView app based on real data about Airline Operations that will help "HighCloud Airlines" make informed business decisions and analysis-guided strategies. HighCloud Airlines executives are evaluating if entering the US market is a good strategy and, if so, which line of business should they focus their investments on; they need QlikView to make the best decision. The application will be evolving chapter by chapter, along with your skills, going from a simple proof of concept to creating a Data Model, adding a custom style, building a Dashboard and handling and manipulating the source data via script. We will meet the "HighCloud Airlines" requirement by using many different data visualization objects and time-saving techniques. The whole application uses real data taken from the Bureau of Transportations statistics of the US and encompasses the operations of Airlines both domestic and international. With three years worth of data, you will help HighCloud Airlines discover where people travel the most, which are the Carriers with the most market share, what is the average load factor per airline, which aircraft is the most used to perform flights, which are the busiest airports, and a whole universe of new insights.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
QlikView 11 for Developers
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The master calendar


Finally, our last set of best practices on data modeling involves dealing with dates and times. When analyzing data, time often plays an important role. Initially, it's not much of the individual transactions and events that users are interested in, but rather the rolled up totals per period, or trends over multiple periods.

Source systems usually record the date at which a particular transaction or event took place, but do not contain any further information for time grouping. This makes sense, as transactional systems strive not to include redundant data. In our QlikView documents, however, we strive to make the selections and aggregations as easy as possible for our users. That is why, in addition to the original date, we include attributes such as the month, quarter, and year components in our data model.

Rather than placing these attributes directly in our fact table, as we've done until now, the best practice is to create a separate master calendar dimension table...