Business Intelligence - Comparision Matrix

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BI Product	Tableau	Qlik- QlikView	SAS	Microstrategy
Company	Tableau Software	QlikTech	SAS Institute	Microstrategy
Product URL	http://www.tableau.com/	http://www.qlik.com/	https://www.sas.com/	www.microstrategy.com
Segment	Leaders	Leaders	Leaders	Leaders
STRENGTHS	Users can leverage the power of Self Service analytics with cool visualizations, drangging and dropping objects, measures and dimensions.	Scripting has ablity to make clean data and do best data modelling. Patent associative tecnology.		Schema & SQL Engine uniqueness
WEAKNESSES	Data integration can be quite complex and without a clean data source the software isn't much use.	GUI is sill not good as compared to Tableau or Qlik Sense		Development is not good in Desktop & Web and many options miss in web.
Deployment Platforms	Windows	Windows	Windows,Linux	Windows,Linux
Self-service tools	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mobility	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Encryption In QlikView

There is no documented encryption functions for QlikView but it is possible with Expressor or VB script macro.
Using a self contained JavaScript encryption implementation i.e CyrptoJS and a few helper functions in the macro module, it is possible to encrypt and decrypt values in QlikView.

Create an empty QVW and copy this into the macro module. Also, add the encrypt/decrypt helper functions below at the end of the macro module.

function encrypt(value, key) {
    return CryptoJS.AES.encrypt(value, key).toString();
}
function decrypt(value, key) {
    return CryptoJS.AES.decrypt(value, key).toString(CryptoJS.enc.Utf8);
}


Now QlikView can encrypt and decrypt values using a specified key.

// Setup the encryption key
Let vEncryptionKey = 'Your Encryption Key Goes Here!099';

// Example with variable
Let vName = 'Justin';
Let vEncryptedName = encrypt('$(vName)', '$(vEncryptionKey)');
Let vDecryptedName = decrypt('$(vEncryptedName)', '$(vEncryptionKey)');

// Example with LOAD
ExampleWithLOAD:
Load
    Name,
    EncryptedName,
    decrypt(EncryptedName, '$(vEncryptionKey)') as DecryptedName
;
Load
    Name,
    encrypt(Name, '$(vEncryptionKey)') as EncryptedName
;
Load
    'Justin' as Name
AutoGenerate 5;

Data Compression in QlikView

QlikView uses an associative in-memory technology to allow users to analyze and process data very quickly. Unique entries are only stored once in-memory thus removing repetition in the data: everything else are pointers to the parent data. That’s why QlikView is faster and stores more data in memory than traditional cubes.
 e.g. if you have a million rows of data but a field contains only 100 unique values, then QlikView stores those 100 values only and not a million values. This applies equally to the RAM QlikView will need to hold the data as well as the hard disk space needed to store the QVW and QVD files. Since Qlikview is an in momry associative technology, you're limited only by the number of records you can fit in memory.
The limitations of the application are restricted by the physical capacity of the server running the document, the complexity of that document, and the density of the data.

If the report loads sales order data, for example, and the data contains customer name then there may be many duplicate values in the data for any customer who has ordered many times. QV will only store the customer name once and then keep track of where that customer name is used again as subsequent rows are loaded. 

You can even use this fact to your advantage when dealing with large volumes of data in QlikView. Breaking down a field into several fields can cause more repetition and thus reduce the amount of resources QV needs to hold the data both in RAM and on disk. Email addresses are prime candidates for this technique as the domain part will likely not be unique to one entry. Take this example:

Email Address

abcd@qlik.com
xyz@qlik.com
lmn@qlik.com


QlikView will consider each of these values as unique and thus will be storing the "@qlik.com" part repeatedly. If you were to split the email addresses at the "@” then the domain part becomes the same for all 3 records and thus QV will store it only once. You can split the email address using the following lines within a load statement:

....
Left (Email,index(Email,'@')-1) AS EmailName,
Right (Email, len(Email)-index(Email, '@')) AS EmailDomain
....

When wanting to display the email address in a chart you only have to concatenate the 2 fields together remembering to replace the '@' in the middle like this:

EmailName & '@' & EmailDomain

The same technique can be used for mail addresses, phone numbers, part codes and any other patterned, repetitive data.