In June 2012, Qlik announced the purchase of Expressor Software. The press release talked about a metadata intelligence solution for data lineage and data governance, but what exactly is this product?

There are a couple of parts to the technology that are interesting. The main business of Expressor Software was the creation of an ETL tool that could connect to multiple different data sources, read data, and write it out to different locations. As part of this, they happened to create connectors that could connect to QlikView files—QVW, QVD, and QVX—and read both data and metadata from those files. They also created connectors to write out data in QVX format. Obviously, they felt that the QlikView market was worth going after.

Almost as a side effect, they were able to create the genesis of what is today the QlikView Governance Dashboard. Using their technology, they were able to connect to QlikView files and read enough metadata to create a full governance...