1. Business Intelligence 101
MAKING SENSE OF YOUR DATA

2. What is BI?
The Mission of BI is to deliver consistent, accurate, and useful information to the business units in a timely manner to support effective decision making.
- Some examples:
- Printed reports used by managers to determine the top salesperson for the week.
- Dashboards with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that show the latest return-on-investment figures. Executives can use this data to see if a current strategy is working or not.

3. “Old” BI
Data came from one system at a time (e.g. personnel data came from the HR system; advertising data came from the advertising system).
Merging data from multiple systems was not possible (unless you did it “manually”, perhaps in Excel).
Data was primarily in the form of tabular, printed reports. If you were fancy you would have some pie charts and bar charts.
“What if” exercises were week-long number-crunching marathons.

4. *New* BI
Data from multiple systems can be combined (e.g. merging advertising data with subscriber data to find the most profitable zip codes).
Data can be viewed in a format that fits the data and the audience.
Executives like pretty pictures.
Analysts like lots of numbers.
Managers are somewhere in between.
“What if” exercises are commonplace.

5. Tools to Get There
ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) Tools to move data from a transactional system to a data warehouse. (Why? So reporting doesn’t impact operations; plus data warehouses are generally optimized for reporting)
Reporting and Presentation Tools to display the data so it can be used effectively.
Data Mining and Analysis Tools to allow further examination of the data.
Infrastructure Tools to allow scheduling of tasks, logging, managing the tools and environment, etc.
And more…

6. QlikView 101
Got Data?

7. San Diego Union-Tribune History with QlikView
Went live with BI and QlikView when we went live with Adbase in
Management reporting is overwhelmingly from SalesFlash, a QlikView document.
10-20 power users, mostly financial analysts and middle management.

8. What is QlikView?

9. No, really. What is it?
QlikView is a dynamic BI tool – somewhere between a Reporting and Presentation Tool and a Data Analysis Tool.
QlikView is the application used by Newscycle to create “Analytix” (their suite of QlikView documents) – SalesFlash.qvw and Advertising Analytix.qvw are two of these.
QlikView is ‘like Excel on steroids’.
From QlikView Marketing Info: “QlikView is the most flexible Business Intelligence platform for turning data into knowledge…QlikView promotes unrestricted analysis of application data, helping users make time-saving and accurate decisions. ”

10. Using QlikView Time for a demo: Filtering Grouping and Sorting
Selections, Clear, Back, Select Excluded, Multiple Selections
 Generally a selection will apply across all tabs and views in a document (exceptions are with Set Analysis).
Grouping and Sorting
Expand/Collapse
Quick Output
Printing, Send to Excel, etc.
Creating and Using Bookmarks

11. It’s Magic! – Not! Behind the scenes in QlikView Scripts:
QlikView scripting language is like “SQL on steroids”.
Can use SQL in QlikView scripts to load data from the database.
Can load from Core, BI, other SQL databases.
[Caution: Depending on what you’re doing and when, you could be impacting operations.]
Can load data from Excel and other external files.
Can save to and load from other QlikView documents (QVWs or optimized QVD files).
Can “transform” and create data in scripts.

12. Qlikview internals
QlikView’s in-memory engine allows for fast data access and calculation.*
When the document is opened it is loaded into RAM.
Amount of RAM required depends on number of “distinct data points in a given field not the number of records”.[1]
Too little RAM could cause “paging” to disk (slooooow).
All aggregations of data are done real-time (i.e. when you make selections).
If a chart takes “too long” (more than a few seconds) to recalculate, then you might need to add another core and/or CPU to the server (which will allow parallel processing).
*If the hardware is sufficient (e.g. enough RAM to fit the data and sufficient cores and CPUs to support recalculations).
[1] DS-Technical-Brief-QlikView-Architecture-and-System-Resource-Usage-EN.pdf

13. Distribution Environment

16. QlikView Management Console (QMC)
Monitor QlikView use
Set QlikView parameters
Load QlikView documents