why we want to drop table, difference between drop table and regular load data

[coloful_architect]

Hi Qlik Masters,

a very general and rudimentary question, why we want to use drop table? how is that different from our regular load process? 

thanks 

[ArnadoSandoval · Accepted solution]

Hi @coloful_architect 

The quick answer is to free memory; there are some considerations regarding your question, driven by the type of application you are building:

1. QVD generation applications.
2. Dashboards applications.

QVD generation applications:

These applications load the data from different data sources and write it into QVDs to later be consumed by Dashboard applications; QVD generators could generate from a single qvd to several of them, (depending on the implementation approach) if the QVD generator generate several qvds, it makes sense to drop their table from memory immediately after creating the QVD, by doing so, the QVD Generator job will consume the server memory more efficiently.

Dashboards applications:

These applications in most cases load QVD files while building the dashboard model, sometimes they could be loading data from XL files as well; from time to time, you may need to load some data temporarily, so apply their data to other objects in the data model, in these scenarios, any table that is not part of the dashboard solution ought to be dropped, for the same reason of freeing up memory resources.

Hope this helps,