It was back in April at Qonnections, our 10th global partner conference that we unveiled Qlik Sense 2.0 and shared our platform strategy with the world. It was also the first time we talked in detail about our plans for QlikView 12. Today I’m delighted to be able to share the news that it’s arrived! QlikView 12 will you please stand up and show yourself to the world!
There is no doubt that this is an eagerly awaited release by many of our 37,000 strong global customer base. But why? QlikView is a very mature product, it's functionally rich, and it’s undoubtedly in my opinion the product that revolutionized business intelligence and ultimately created the global data discovery market as we know it today. So what is so important about QlikView 12?
An investment in QlikView 12 is an investment in Qlik
With QlikView 12, Qlik delivers on its commitment to its proven, market-leading data discovery solution which secures our customers long term investment in the product. It also lays the foundation for our customers to partner with Qlik to build out their business intelligence strategies and meet the expanding needs of their BI consumers by addressing multiple use cases through a unique platform approach to visual analytics.
QlikView 12 now runs on the second generation QIX (Qlik Data Indexing) engine that powers the entire Qlik portfolio. With this improvement, we can more easily help customers address new use cases in Qlik Sense by allowing them to share data models across the platform.
Our investments also benefit the way our customers use QlikView today. QlikView 12 delivers a number of deployment, performance, security and connectivity enhancements along with greater accessibility through enhanced mobile touch-enabled capabilities. In addition QlikView customers will be able to now take advantage of Qlik’s strategy to deliver value added cloud services – such as Qlik’s “Data as a Service” offering, Qlik DataMarket.
(If you want to see some of this in action check out this brief presentation)
QlikView 12 - What's New Presentation
QlikView - REST Connector
QlikView - Qlik Data Market
Put simply, QlikView is a business intelligence solution with an unrivaled pedigree, functional richness and delivers the lowest cost of ownership in the market. Many customers have already delivered robust guided analytics and dashboards to knowledge workers across their organizations, and with QlikView 12, that investment is secured.
Thanks for the update. May I suggest that for performance improvement statements such as this, that you consider releasing a supplementary example benchmark app with accompanying scalability lab test results against a defined hardware spec showing the lab proven performance increase under well-defined pre-conditions? The issue with high level statements like 'more columns = greater performance improvement expected' is that it's fuzzy, imprecise and often gets perpetuated like Chinese whispers. It reminds me of the old Qlik pre-sales statement that each user should add between 10% - 15% memory consumption overhead relative to the base document memory footprint. An easy message that has been heavily circulated amongst Qlik and Qlik partners alike, but which is completely and utterly untrue! For those that are curious about the truth - users just increase volume of queries against the server, hence the speed at which the cache starts saturating with results. Leave a single user on a server for long enough and they may eat up the full lower memory band (default server setting: 70% of total) all by themselves. This is a pretty intuitive cache design and does not imply any issue with catering for large volume of users. There is of course more to it than what I've described but never the less, my explanation is infinitely more accurate than the pre-sales statement of 10% - 15% overhead per user.
Note that the application I tested performance against is exactly that - an application with wider than normal fact table, yet we have not identified any performance improvement of 12 over 11.20 SR2 (or SR13, tested today). For reference, my fact table is 77 fields wide - sparsely populated structure, mainly measures. Of course hardware and infrastructure introduces other variables that could skew results, but it seems unlikely that a like for like local test (not over network) on the same machine would not manifest any obvious performance improvement should this statement be true as currently articulated.
I appreciate that it is order of magnitudes more effort to provide hard evidence than to simply describe expected performance improvement, yet I feel this is exactly what is needed to deliver release announcements with a high degree of confidence that the improvement claims will stand up under scrutiny. It will also give the community easy, instant tools to dry run an upgrade and verify first hand if their specific environments indeed will be able to realize stated benefits.
