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Not applicable

How good is QlikView when compared to other tools!

Hi All,

Just for a while I was just thinking which is the best of BI tool that is running in the current market. To be frank to whomsoever I spoke about QlikView most of them told that I never heard such tool and they all said that Oracle's (OBIEE) is the best which is currently running in the market.

Though I am very much happy with the way qlikview works, but is it the one everyone is looking in the market. Many of them shared their experience about OBIEE, Cognos and many more. But all those people said that they were never aware of tool called QlikView in the market.

May be because of my less experience with qlikview and BI my opinion may also be wrong.

But are we in right path choosing qlikview for our BI? If yes let know how good is qlikview when compared to other tools like OBIEE, cognos and etc.

Hope people who have experience in using various tools for their BI can give good opinion here for me as well as for others also.

Thanks and Regards,

Rikab

15 Replies
Not applicable
Author

Hi dsjain,

As per my knowledge Qlikview is one of the most successfull BI tool current trend. Because it is very user friendly, installaion is in seconds of time, Learning qlikview for new guys in hours(Basics) and like so many advantages are there..

Regards,

Ravi...

Not applicable
Author

In my experience so far you should see with QlikView that:

It is cheaper

The knowledge required for scripting can sometimes be found in a 'power user' and they can get reasonable results without the need of a pure technical developer.

The engine allows for "on-the-fly-drilldown" over a huge amount of data, no need to define the path for exploration.

Time to live is way below that of other tools - I see BO developers struggle with promotion of code through environments; with the QVW its normally a case of a change to the database connection string, a single file copy for the qvw to the production QVS and you're away.

There is very little user training required - 5 minutes is about it, and that is simply telling them that they can click of stuff and data they know will turn green, white or grey.

Having a Cognos developer ask you to do an 'aggr' plus a rank() on other (set analysis) data because he cannot do it in Cognos is a win.

The look on DBA's faces when they take the database server offline and the QlikView report still works.... whilst other traditional BI solutions that rely upon a live link fall over in a heap.

Performance issues are always down to the QlikView developer- the only time you can blame a DBA is when the Load is very slow - again no live link to the database means all of that lovely selection power is self contained to QlikView... you won't ever hear a QV Developer blaming operational performance on an overloaded database.

Other solutions do not come anywhere close when combining multiple sources of data. I've just witnessed a DBA struggling with a file loader. Loading files in QV is so trivial, doing that over 1000 files is easy.. combine that with people data from HR and costs from Finance... easy! Forget spending weeks in BODI defining transformation.

Less hardware- 1 big server please. Or just 1 server 😉 We don't need a rhealm of servers for each environment, more database servers to run tranformations and another server for presentation layer. Of course QV will scale for those deployments... but that is the point - it can be as big or small as you need; initial cost is very low to get the good benefits.

Popularity is an issue however that is always going to be the case with visionary technology. I regularly compete against Cognos, BO/SAP, Hyperion/Oracle, Microsoft.... QlikView wins in so many areas.

To sum it up - I have time to write this post whilst I am still waiting for data to be put into a traditional datawarehouse (which I wish they'd just let me point QV at!!)
😄

Not applicable
Author

Hi Jain,

You have initiated this topic. Well i'm also trying to know the pros and cons faced by the person who use QV.

The advantage of using QV is, if we export a report which has more that 65 536 rows into xls sheet it will be exported to sheet 1, sheet2. Hope you can understand this.

The Disadvantage is if we try to load lots of data, some time due to system memory and CPU usage the report runs slow even i get "out of virtual memory".

These problem is faced by me in QV v8.5.

I also use Cognos for analysis (analysis studio). The problem in QV while loading the data is not observed in cognos, sine they have restricition to view only 9999 rows of data's. Others can be viewed after exporting into file.

Regards,

R.Srinivasan.

Not applicable
Author

Our company has had experiance with cognos. We did a re-evaluation of the two tools a few months back and decided to stick with qlikview. The capabilities and the low overhead to get the app platform running is why we chose it again.

Cognos requires significant more man power and resources then qlikview does to get rolling.

Qlikview is an new tool in the US and is growing significantly.

johnw
Champion III
Champion III

I have no direct experience with other BI tools, so I can't tell you the strengths and weaknesses of each tool based on personal experience. For a hopefully-unbiased comparison of some of the available BI tools, you can look at some of the links in the resource library, such as the "Gartner Research Report: 2010 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms". It was an interesting read.

http://www.qlik.com/us/explore/resources/analyst-reports/gartner-report-magic-quadrant

Looks like the "Aberdeen Axis for BI/Performance Management, 2009" might also be interesting, but I haven't read it yet.

http://www.qlik.com/us/explore/resources/analyst-reports/aberdeen-axis-for-bi-performance-management...

And QlikTech may pick and choose what they put in their resource library, which could introduce intentional or unintentional bias. So you may want to do some searching elsewhere to see if the message is consistent with what you see here.

mongolu
Creator
Creator

We've got both presentations (IBM's Cognos and QlikTech's QlikView) firstly and decided to purchase QlikView for that main considerent that you've described above.

More man power, resources and money spent on training, for Cognos implementation.

But, i remember, from the Cognos presentation, one nasty thing: if you make a report and want the user to "Drill-Down", you must build again the same report, but at the drilled-down level and connect them. Something like that. Disgraceful, if not stupid.

As for QlikView, it has one major shortcoming (from my point of view): you can't make a select (load) from more than 2 tables residing in memory at some point in time. That's making loading data into QlikView a step-by-step process and that's time consuming.

As for the words of priase, i've got only for QlikView, but not because it's better. It's the only one i've touched.

Not applicable
Author

Hello All,

I have heard from many that Oracle's OBIEE is integrated with other BI tools such as hypherion, siebel, cognos and etc. Because of this they all told that it is already the best of BI in the current market and there wont be any future for qlikview in the coming days.

I am not sure whether i got the right message or not. If any one heard the same or feel that it is wrong then please share your experience here.

Thanks and Regards,

Rikab

Anonymous
Not applicable
Author

Rikab,

No matter how good Oracle is - there is no such thing is "the best solution for all situations". Oracle requires extensive (and expensive) infrastructure, while QlikView does not. If the infrustructure is already in place, then it probably makes sense to consider Oracle BI. Or maybe not - it depends on the specific requirements. I know companies that use Oracle, but QlikView is the BI tool of choice.
I doubt that it could be a situation where it would be reasonable to build infrastructure - that is equipment, licenses specialists - only for BI purposes when it would be way less expensive to use QlikView.

johnw
Champion III
Champion III


dsjain wrote:I have heard from many that Oracle's OBIEE is integrated with other BI tools such as hypherion, siebel, cognos and etc. Because of this they all told that it is already the best of BI in the current market and there wont be any future for qlikview in the coming days.


Every software vendor would have you believe that their software is the best, and that all other software vendors will soon be driven out of the market completely. It has never been true. It will never be true.

That's not to say that Oracle isn't a great product, though frankly, my understanding from a friend that works with it is that Oracle isn't a great product. It's OK, but not great. It's just another ERP. It's just another piece of software. It's just another competitor in an open market.

Now, if I'm remembering correctly, Oracle bought Hyperion and is bundling it with their software. If so, I suspect there is now much less reason for new Oracle users to also buy QlikView. But there are a lot of companies already using QlikView with Oracle who are happy with their implemenation and are unlikely to change. There are probably a few companies who will buy QlikView to use with new Oracle implementations. And most importantly, not every shop uses Oracle. We don't use Oracle, so besides mere intellectual curiosity, I couldn't care less which BI tool Oracle bundles with their software. It is completely irrelevant to me.