Qlik and the Associative Model?

[baiselmareo6]

Hi all, recently I've been reading up on the latest versions of QlikView and Qlik Sense, and while I do appreciate a lot of the other features of competitor products, such as Tableau and PowerBI, it seems like this Associative Model has a number of interesting advantages.

In the past, it seem like Qlik wanted to offer a "guided" experience to BI, versus a more "self-service" experience by other competitors, and of course, this has been an area of development and debate for some time.

However, recently I found that SAP Lumira (formerly SAP Visual Intelligence), had adopted this Associative approach, and after looking into it a bit, started thinking that it might really be a best practice. Or, to try to be more precise, for large, complex, enterprise data sets, it's very hard to be fully "self-service", since you'd need certain guidance to have some knowledge/confidence that you're doing the right thing, looking at the right place, or having it the right way.

Anyone else feel that way? Or, do anyone feel that a standard relational model has advantages vs. this approach favored by Qlik & SAP?

[marcus_sommer · Accepted solution]

IMO the associative datamodel is much more powerful as the standard relational datamodel. Beside this the used datamodel and/or the tools are not so much important in regard of a guided or a self-service experience else the complexity of the data.

Many companies have multiple and quite different data-sources and often a whole bunch of poor data-generating processes and a lot of exceptions to the official declared default-logics - so it will really need some technically/data knowledge as well as knowledge about the business to build something useful and to interpret the views properly. But the majority of the users won't be capable for it - neither in understanding a bit more advanced logic nor even in creating one.

Therefore self-service is just for rather simple scenarios or for really advanced users practicable and for everything else are more or less guided structures needed.

- Marcus