I’m a BA for the Data Warehouse and the Qlik Apps for our company. I just recently switched companies and at my new company, they try to solve almost everything with Qlik Apps, but in all my classes and/or certificate programs I was taught that the front end tool should be ‘dumb’. The data logic should be in the data warehouse. The consultants for Qlik think otherwise and try to transform in qvd. What is the best practice in your company?
It must not be black or white else it could be each shade of grey. It will depend on various factors which grey might be the most suitable for your company. And this aren't only purely data-related aspects else also all kinds of governance and administration, for example in regard to access rights, API's to other systems, licence-aspects, relation to the business units, manpower, time-frames to get new solutions respectively for any adjustments and many more.
Further it's also a question what everybody relates to a DWH. For me a DWH is dumb because the only task is to collect the data from everywhere - nothing else. Any transformation of the data goes ahead. Yes, often they do a lot more but where are the border-lines between the multiple tasks and who is in the end responsible for what? It goes a bit in the direction to simply call it IT - it's not really wrong but very unspecific.
Beside this Qlik has an extremely powerful ETL part which could be very performant in a multi-tier data-architecture with incremental approaches based on qvd-slices on all layers. Why shouldn't these strengths not be used - even if many of the work might be also done on the DWH-side? Probably there are further tools involved - picking from each the best may be a good starting point to look is it worth to do it in this way or if you could live with second/third best and use them in a more all-round approach and minimizing with it the administrative overhead.
