QlikTech and QlikView
Analysis of QlikTech (now called Qlik Technologies), vendor of the memory-centric QlikView business intelligence products. Related subjects include:
Intelligent Enterprise’s Editors’/Editor’s Choice list for 2010
As he has before, Intelligent Enterprise Editor Doug Henschen
- Personally selected annual lists of 12 “Most influential” companies and 36 “Companies to watch” in analytics- and database-related sectors.
- Made it clear that these are his personal selections.
- Nonetheless has called it an Editors’ Choice list, rather than Editor’s Choice. 🙂
(Actually, he’s really called it an “award.”)
Research agenda for 2010
As you may have noticed, I’ve been posting less research/analysis in November and December than during some other periods. In no particular order, reasons have included: Read more
Business intelligence notes and trends
I keep not finding the time to write as much about business intelligence as I’d like to. So I’m going to do one omnibus post here covering a lot of companies and trends, then circle back in more detail when I can. Top-level highlights include:
- Jaspersoft has a new v3.5 product release. Highlights include multi-tenancy-for-SaaS and another in-memory OLAP option. Otherwise, things sound qualitatively much as I wrote last September.
- Inforsense has a cool composite-analytical-applications story. More precisely, they said my phrase “analytics-oriented EAI” was an “exceptionally good” way to describe their focus. Inforsense’s biggest target market seems to be health care, research and clinical alike. Financial services is next in line.
- Tableau Software “gets it” a little bit more than other BI vendors about the need to decide for yourself how to define metrics. (Of course, it’s possible that other “exploration”-oriented new-style vendors are just as clued-in, but I haven’t asked in the right way.)
- Jerome Pineau’s favorable view of Gooddata and unfavorable view of Birst are in line with other input I trust. I’ve never actually spoken with the Gooddata folks, however.
- Seth Grimes suggests the qualitative differences between open-source and closed-source BI are no longer significant. He has a point, although I’d frame it more as being about the difference between the largest (but acquisition-built) BI product portfolios and the smaller (but more home-grown) ones, counting open source in the latter group.
- I’ve discovered about five different in-memory OLAP efforts recently, and no doubt that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
- I’m hearing ever more about public-facing/extranet BI. Information Builders is a leader here, but other vendors are talking about it too.
A little more detail Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Business intelligence, Information Builders, Inforsense, Jaspersoft, QlikTech and QlikView, Scientific research, Tableau Software | 8 Comments |
Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence
A few days ago I tore into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS. Well, the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms is out too. Unlike the data warehouse MQ, Gartner’s BI MQ clusters its “Leaders” together tightly. But while less bold, the Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant’s claims are just as questionable as those in data warehousing.
February, 2011 edit: Here’s a partial link that works right now.
Of course, some parts do make sense. E.g.: Read more
Extensive QlikView coverage from a big fan and reseller
David Raab is a reseller and great fan of QlikTech’s QlikView. His recent lengthy post about the product (I hesitate to call it “detailed” only because he rightly complains that QlikTech is in fact stingy with technical detail) is positive enough to have been recommended by the company itself. Specifically, it was cited in the comment thread to my recent post on QlikTech, where David himself also addressed some of my questions.
But of course, no technology is perfect, not even one as great as David thinks QlikView is. Read more
QlikTech/QlikView update
I talked with Anthony Deighton of memory-centric BI vendor QlikTech for an hour and a half this afternoon. QlikTech is quite the success story, with disclosed 2007 revenue of $80 million, up 80% year over year, and confidential year-to-date 2008 figures that do not disappoint as a follow-on. And a look at the QlikTech’s QlikView product makes it easy to understand how this success might have come about.
Let me start by reviewing QlikTech’s technology, as best I understand it.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Columnar database management, Database compression, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView | 17 Comments |
Intelligent Enterprise’s list of 12/36/48 vendors
I’m getting a flood of press releases today, because many of the companies I write about were selected to Intelligent Enterprise’s list of 12 most influential vendors plus 36 more to watch in the areas Intelligent Enterprise covers (which seems to be pretty much the analytics-related parts of what I write about here and on Text Technologies). It looks like a pretty reasonable list, although I think they forced the issue in some of the small analytics vendors they selected, and of course anybody can quibble with some of the omissions.
Among the companies they cited, you can find topical categories here for IBM (and Cognos), Informatica, Microsoft, Netezza, Oracle, SAP/Business Objects (both), SAS, and Teradata; QlikTech; Cast Iron, Coral8, DATAllegro, HP, ParAccel, and StreamBase; and Software AG. On Text Technologies you’ll find categories for some of the same vendors, plus Attensity, Clarabridge, and Google. There also are categories for some of these vendors on the Monash Report.
The era of memory-centric BI may have finally started
SAP is acquiring Business Objects. There’s nothing inherent in BI Accelerator’s design that ties it to NetWeaver, SAP star schema InfoCubes, or any other particular current implementation detail. So BI Accelerator could become a lot more than an afterthought.
Combine that with Cognos’s acquisition of Applix and the continued success of upstart QlikView, and we could finally see a general memory-centric BI boom.
Maybe. There have been a lot of false alarms before.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Business Objects, Cognos, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView, SAP AG | 3 Comments |
A negative take on QlikView
Apparently, one user isn’t happy with QlikView at all. The main problem seems to be, in effect, frequently-repeated bulk loads from disk into the in-memory structures. (Obviously — at least absent more information — that could be an artifact of a stupidly ignorant installation, rather than a fundamental problem with the technology itself.) He’s also not at all enamored of QlikView’s app dev tools.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView | 2 Comments |
Will database compression change the hardware game?
I’ve recently made a lot of posts about database compression. 3X or more compression is rapidly becoming standard; 5X+ is coming soon as processor power increases; 10X or more is not unrealistic. True, this applies mainly to data warehouses, but that’s where the big database growth is happening. And new kinds of data — geospatial, telemetry, document, video, whatever — are highly compressible as well.
This trend suggests a few interesting possibilities for hardware, semiconductors, and storage.
- The growth in demand for storage might actually slow. That said, I frankly think it’s more likely that Parkinson’s Law of Data will continue to hold: Data expands to fill the space available. E.g., video and other media have near-infinite potential to consume storage; it’s just a question of resolution and fidelity.
- Solid-state (aka semiconductor or flash) persistent storage might become practical sooner than we think. If you really can fit a terabyte of data onto 100 gigs of flash, that’s a pretty affordable alternative. And by the way — if that happens, a lot of what I’ve been saying about random vs. sequential reads might be irrelevant.
- Similarly, memory-centric data management is more affordable when compression is aggressive. That’s a key point of schemes such as SAP’s or QlikTech’s. Who needs flash? Just put it in RAM, persisting it to disk just for backup.
- There’s a use for faster processors. Compression isn’t free. What you save on disk space and I/O you pay for at the CPU level. Those 5X+ compression levels do depend on faster processors, at least for the row store vendors.