Officials are calling QlikView 7 the company’s most significant release of the year and say the new version comes with massive scale analysis.
QlikView pulls together ETL (extract, transform, load), data storage, and end-user tools in a single integrated BI software platform. Processing is based on a patented associative query logic (AQL) technology which the company claims removes the need for companies to build expensive enterprise data warehouses and/or hypercubes for analysis.
Lund, Sweden-based QlikTech worked closely with Intel Corp’s EMEA division over the past year to completely re-fit QlikView for 64-bit support. QlikView 7 now runs on Intel’s x64 and Itanium 64-bit platforms which smash the 4 gigabyte memory currently imposed by 32-bit systems.
As memory costs continue to fall 64-bit support is particularly beneficial to QlikTech since its BI software is built on an in-memory analytic processing engine that breaks the norm of predefined multidimensional cubes and aggregations used by conventional online analytic processing (OLAP) tools.
Instead, QlikView queries and aggregates data in memory; calculating all measures in real-time and across an unlimited number of dimensions. The benefit for users is flexibility to drill through dimensions to transaction level and add new dimension or measure in a quickly and easily.
Officials say that QlikView 7 is scalable enough to load, query and analyze large data sets (millions of records) in seconds. Speedy loading and refreshing is aided by a new incremental loading scheme based off of a QVD staging file, rather than directly from transactional sources systems. QlikTech claims this approach trims data load and refresh times from minutes and hours down to seconds.
To support broader deployments, QlikView 7 also introduces support for dynamic HTML clients which allows customers to extend QlikView deployments deeper into their user base. QlikTech has also introduced several functional enhancements to the end-user and application development interfaces – such as simple drag-and-drop report generation and real-time alerting.
QlikView 7 now supports a number of client deployment options, including a Windows client, ActiveX plug-in client, and OCX component client. The company is also planning to roll out a new Publisher module next month to help with administration and management of the BI system.
We haven’t just recompiled the product, we’ve completely rebuilt it, David Mountain, director of marketing at QlikTech’s North American division, told ComputerWire.
Mountain said the increased scalability that comes with QlikView 7 will open up a whole new class of applications and customers.
QlickView 7 offers a big leap in the quantity of data available to end users. We can refresh millions of data records in a matter of seconds, offering response times of up to 10 to 100 times faster than anything else out there, Mountain said.
He pointed to benchmarks that show QlikView’s competency in handling data loads as high as 4 million records per second through its QVD technology.
Mountain says that cube-based OLAP tools can take as much as half a day to load or refresh even a few tens of millions of records: Since we work with in-memory processing our 32-bit product limited the application size to the addressable memory, typically between 3-4 gigs.
Going into 64-bit arena has now eliminated that cap and makes a lot of things possible now. For instance we can now confidently step-up to the plate with a solution for handling large data volumes like RFID.
Mountain said the company is currently in discussions with a couple of customers about RFID (radio frequency identification) analysis applications.
Even though QlikTech boasts some Fortune 500 customers (like AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and 3M), its main focus up to now has been on small to midsize enterprises. Overall the company has around 1,600 customers (representing 90,000 users) worldwide.
Mountain was reluctant to discuss specific pricing for QlikView 7, saying only that it was very competitive and that a first-time implementation is a mid-to-high five figure deal.
Mountain added the company would continue to sell its 32-bit product which is ideally suited for the mid-market. We’re only looking to migrate customers to the 64-bit platform where it makes sense.
QlikTech is privately held and venture-backed firm. The company was founded in Sweden, QlikTech has subsidiaries in the US, UK, Germany and Scandinavia.
The launch of QlikView 7 follows an extensive beta program involving over 80 companies.
