Qlikview is now a Leader

Hi,

As I was expecting, Qlikview joined the leaders quadrant in Gartner's magic quadrant for BI 2011.
Qlikview is cited as a self contained BI Platform and the strengths being interactive, great visualization and end user friendliness and satisfaction. I am very happy about it.
But I am more focused on seeing the challenges ahead. It will be interesting to see how Qlikview maintain that position and stand in the competition.
The challenges cited by Gartner are
1. Lack of expansive product strategy
2. Limited metadata management
3. Lack of broad (high volume) BI deployments
4. Lack of Microsoft office integration
5. Poor Performance when data volume and number of Users increases.

The findings are not new and Qliktech surely needs to seriously think about these shortcomings.
I want to discuss further on the above points in detail.

1. Lack of expansive product strategy : To compete with large vendors like Oracle, it becomes very important to have a competent product expansion strategy. Oracle has very aggressive product strategy and has a vision to integrate its various offerings like Oracle BI, Hyperion Essbase, Oracle Enterprise performance management and more importantly their pre built analytic models popularly known as BI Applications. Though Qliktech has already taken one step in this direction by targeting application vendors like Salesforce and can offer pre built models for Salesforce customers but this is not enough. Qliktech has to work agressively in developing such pre built models for other but big applications. EPM is one area which is still untouched and lack of vision in this area can be disastrous and will simply throw Qliktech out of competition. Vendors not only should now think of Softwares but also start thinking about offering Hardware configured for optimum and enhanced performance. Oracle has got its popular Oracle Exadata, its database pre configured with HP's hardware and is agressively promoting it.

2. Limited metadata management : Qlikview offers limited metadata management capabilities and the primary reason I see is because Qlikview is focussed on small scale or much smaller than average size deployments, it did not see much relevance of metadata management. This can be dangerous to them as well as their clients as when they grow, they will start seeing the need for it and would require the investment they tried to save at the beginning. Even if Qliktech decides to go for building its capabilities in metadata management, the basic problem for them will be to start believing in OLAP dimensional building which will be against their basic principles. Qliktech market its product as a non OLAP tool which actually is not and treat the underlying data as a cloud in the memory. Hence when it will see the need for conforming dimensions to do cross functional analysis, it may become a matter of choice rather than a matter of capability.

3. Lack of broad (high volume) BI deployments: For Qliktech as mentioned above and as cited in Gartner's report, the major challenge will be to deploy large scale applications. As of now they have proved their capabilities in small or much smaller than average scale deployments and I think that is what Qlikview was made for. One of the Qliktech's selling point is that Qlikview do not require a datawarehouse. Now this same selling point will stop them to move ahead or prove their capabilities in average and large scale deployments.
For those who want to know why, please read one of my earlier post here
This again will depend on reviewing its sales strategy and making corrections to their basic beliefs which is not going to be an easy task. If they do not start using the terms datawarehouse and OLAP, it will difficult to maintain the Leaders position.

4. Lack of Microsoft office integration: This is something I have mentioned in one of my post in Year 2008 read here. It seems Qliktech is least bothered. Its current capabilities are very basic in terms of simple export to MS Excel. In coming releases if it do not develop such capabilities, it will he hard for Gartner or Forrester to give a space to Qliktech in their reports and compare Qlikview with Oracle or IBM. There are many more such features which I have mentioned in my post earlier. Some of them which are important according to me are building connectors for their proprietary QVD and QVW files so that their models can be available to other applications, SQL generation queries to help developers in debugging etc.

5. Poor Performance when data volume and number of Users increases: This is again linked to point number 3 above.

Feel free to post your comments or thoughts.

Till next time

Manohar Rana

BI Project Implementation Life Cycle

Hi,

Recently I went through the website of Qliktech and read where it says "And unlike traditional BI, QlikView delivers immediate value with payback measured in days or weeks rather than months, years, or not at all.". It made me think for a while. what are they referring to ? Do they mean Qlikview as a BI solution can be implemented in weeks? Are they talking only about small department level deployments or just the development phase of the BI project life cycle or is it just a sales pitch? I am just wondering how much part a tool plays in a BI project Implementation life cycle and how does a tool effect the development phase.
Whether you use Qlikview or some traditional BI like OBIEE for that matter, about 70% of the project life cycle remains unaffected or untouched.
Then I thought about my recent Oracle BI Project. If we would have replaced OBIEE with Qlikview, will the whole project gets implemented in weeks instead of months or years. I don't think so.

Well, The topic is BI Project Implementation Life Cycle and not Qlikview.
I have worked on some small Qlikview project Implementations which generally span from 2-4 Months and also large OBIEE implementations ranging from 9 months to close to 1 year.
My latest assignment was a large Oracle BI (OBIEE) Global Implementation Project.
I would like to share my knowledge and learnings from the current as well as previous projects. I will also discuss how large deployments differ from smaller ones and also the different phases involved in a BI project.
Big deployments generally includes ETL as well as BI and takes somewhere around 9 months to 2 Years to implement the solution. But when we compare it with small deployments using tools like Qlikview, it has a small life cycle ranging from somewhere around 3 months to 6 months because they generally do not involve a datawarehouse.
There are various reasons for not having a datawarehouse like

1. Time and Cost: For smaller organisations the IT budgets are generally small. Including Datawarehouse in a BI initiative increases the project cost significantly. The organisations needs to Purchase additional license for a new database. Even if they already have a database in place, it can not be used for various reasons and is not recommended as well. The organisation also needs to purchase a license for a ETL tool and required hardware. Other than the software and Hardware, the cost is involved in hiring resources for database and ETL.

2. Small data size: As small organisations do not have large or huge data sets (Even if they have multiple applications) and hence generally neglect the relevance and importance of having a datawarehouse in place. Not only it complements BI by providing faster response times for BI end users but also it reduces the development cycle of the BI by reducing the level of complexities of the logic. Using a datawarehouse helps in having much simpler BI data models which requires less development time and maintainance.

3. Less complex data models: Small organisations generally have small customised business applications running which do not have very complex OLTP data structures and hence it becomes relatively easy to design BI data models eliminating the need for a datawarehouse solution.

4. Less number of Users: Organisations having smaller number of BI users (Using the application at a given point of time) generally have this option of building their BI solution directly on top of their OLTP database. They can either allow BI users to directly query the OLTP database which in some way reduces the performance of the business application users already connected or they can use tools like Qlikview or Hyperion Essbase which employs this technique of storing the data in their proprietery data file formats and allow a disconnected type analysis. The later one is a much better option as it provides a much faster performance as against querying an OLTP database as for some reason unknown to me these proprietary data files are highly optimized to be used by their respective applications and also this do not impact the performance of the OLTP application.

Now let's discuss a typical BI Project life cycle which comprises of following phases:

1. Project Initiation and Analysis:
For any project to start a business need is a must. for example "replacing an old customized reporting system with a new reporting and analysis system which is more flexible, cost effective, fast and requires less maintainance" or "Need to consolidate data from disparate sources and a common standardized platform for reporting and analysis" could be a business need.This business need is evaluated at a very high level as to how critical is the need and how it well it falls in line with the strategic objectives of an Organization. Formally a Project manager is identified and appointed who further investigate and perform some first level of analysis.
It is then Project manager who creates a document with details like Business case, initial risk assessment, scheduling and budgeting, stakeholders identification etc taking help from the available resources and then a formal approval is taken.

2. Planning and Designing:
Requirements gathering is the most important and critical part of the whole project. A requirement document is created for this purpose and all the requirements are documented in much details. The requirements are finalized and then project scope is created. To fulfill these requirements, various tools are evaluated and whichever is the best fit is selected. Now the team resources are identified. All the logistics, hardware and software requirements are identified and procured.
Data models are designed and it is documented in a Technical design document which also specifies other technical details like features and functionalities of the design, security and authentication, best practices, repository variables, layers, database connections, connection pools etc etc..
Prototypes are designed to show the features and functionalities as documented in the requirement document and is formally approved. Project kickoff.

3. Development:
Before starting the development of the data models and reports, the project scope is divided into small more manageable modules or batches.
It is a good practice to divide it on the basis of functional areas and subject areas.
So let's suppose we decided to do it for functional area Human Resources among other functional areas like Sales and Distribution, finance, Inventory and Manufacturing etc under which we are planning to create different subject areas like

Employee Compensation and Bonus, Learning and Development, Employee movements and transfers etc. You may have one data model for complete HR or seperate data models for each subject areas.
For smaller organizations with less complex OLTP data structures, it is possible and feasible to have a single data model for complete Human Resources.
For large and complex OLTP structures, it is generally not possible as otherwise the size of the fact table will be extremely large horizontally as well as vertically. This will give an extremely slow performance as well as from maintainance perspective also the time taken to load the fact table will be more and unpractical.
Once we decide on our strategy for the development, we start with developing the data model as per the designs created in the previous phase i.e Planning and Designing.
The data model is developed generally in layers. In Oracle OBIEE, there are three layers and Cognos allows you to build as many layers as you wish and BO provides 2 layers(I am not very sure on this and would request some comments on this).
In Qlikview, we can make it single layered or 2 layered by renaming the column names in the script.
For all practical purposes, upto 3 layers is a good idea but you may agree or disagree on that. Based on your
requirements of maintainance you can decide on that.
OBIEE has 3 predefined layers namely Physical Layer, Business and Modeling layer and Presentation layer.
Physical layer is where we simply make connections to the database and import the metadata for database objects like tables, columns, views, primary and foreign key relationships. Now we do not make any changes related to changing the names of the columns which help the administrator and developers from maintainance perspective.
Based on the available physical layer objects we create our OLAP models in Business layer by defining dimensions, facts and Hierarchies.
In the presentation layer, we categorize the objects based on subject areas from the objects available in OLAP model in Business layer. We rename the objects present in Presentation layer from end users perspective or business terminology.
This whole process really helps the developers to understand and visualize the complete model and saves lot of time in debugging or day to day maintainance activities. This process oriented approach is again an attempt to divide and rule and making our life a bit simpler.
Once you are done with your model, the next step is to start developing your reports and bringing in the identified resources for report development into the team.
The reports based on the subject area are divided among the team and with the help of report specifications available in Technical design document created in the previous phase.The reports are generally designed by report developers.
While the report designers are engaged, the data model developers work developing the next subject area. Initially the team size is less and as the work keeps on growing, more people are added in the team.
The development also includes setting up the object level as well as data level security , creating users and groups and creating variables as per the technical design document.

4. Testing
Testing is one of the most critical phase and also sometimes most time consuming phase of a BI project Implementation.
There are 3 types of testing done on a project namely Unit Testing (UT), System Integration Testing (SIT) and User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
Unit Testing is generally done by the developers and they test that the code or report they have developed is working as per the requirement or specifications. This is performed in Development environment where Developers had developed the
report. Developers prepare a test case plan for themselves listing all the cases they would like to test. These cases could be testing the font size, color, spell check, prompts, filters, data values etc.
Sometimes developers may exchange the reports with their team members to perform a peer unit testing and this is a good practice as it is little easier to find out mistakes in other's report than your own.
Once Unit testing is complete, the code (data models and reports) are transferred to Test Environment.
This Testing Environment is generally similar to the production environment but that is not the case always. Having the test environment same as production environment allows us to anticipate the performance and behavior of the developed solution in a much better way.
Once the code is transferred to Test environment, System Integration Testing is performed. SIT checks how all the individually pieces works collectively and are integrated well to produce the desired output. This test is performed by the IT team members or by identified testers from the client side. However before they perform the test a sampling based dry run is required to be performed by the development team.
Once the testing team start testing the application, they put all the defects in a defect log sheet mentioning the
details of the defect.
At this point of time, it is recommended to appoint some dedicated members from the development team to fix those identified defects and update the defect log sheet. While this activity is going on, other team members are assigned next set of development work and they keep working on developing next batch of reports. It may happen that the same team will fix the defects by allocating some portion of their time and rest of the time in developing next batch reports. But this may bring some imbalance or turbulence in the system as it will become very difficult to really work on two things simultaneously. Bug fixing involves lot of coordination with ETL team as well as testers and sometimes consumes time more than what was anticipated which ultimately may impact the development activities. Having a dedicated team for bux fixing activities would be very useful and effective.
Once all bugs are identified and fixed, the Business users are asked to perform the User acceptance test. The test cases are prepared by business users and they check if all the requirements are fulfilled and they really getting what they want. Here business users compare the result set with the result set from their existing system and verify the results.
One of the biggest challenge in SIT or UAT is if any data related inaccuracies are found, it becomes really difficult to find the root cause. The developer needs to check which version is true. There may be some internal logic or transformations or formulas applied in the existing application and this analysis consumes whole lot of time requiring lot of coordination with the team supporting the existing application or system.

5. Implementation
After the code is tested and verified completely, it is transferred to the production environment and opened for the real end users. Before that general awareness sessions and training sessions are held for the end users to use the new system. For some time the new system is put on a stabilization period (Generally ranges from 15 days to 2 or 3 months but it could be even more) where in case a bug occurs, it is fixed by the same development team.
During this time the new system or application is made to run parallel with the existing system or application and once the stabilization period is over, the old system is replaced partially or completely.
Once the stabilization period is over and the system gets stabilized, the support team is provided with all the project related knowledge and the development team is rolled off.
The implementation of BI Project gets over.

Please feel free to share your comments.

Manohar Rana

Qlikview Personal Edition

Hi,

Qlikview is the emerging name in the Business Intelligence world and becoming very popular among the user community due to its easy to use interface, fast deployment and very strong visualisation.

Qliktech released its version 9 recently with a new Edition called Qlikview 9Personal Edition having all the developer features.

Earlier Qlikview use to provide only 15 days of evaluation period for people who want to give it a try which is really a very small duration to try or evaluate a Business Intelligence Tool.
This limits the user to use it beyond that period.

Now with version 9, Qliktech allows to download the personal edition from their website for free and use the product for personal use for an unlimited period of time and does not require any key.

So, that in real sense a very good news for the student community as well as for startup businesses or small growing businesses to use Qlikview for their personal use.

As small business generally has lot of data in flat files or excel files, Qlikview becomes a very handy Business Intelligence Software as Qlikview is very easy and effective when you have lot of excel files or combination of flat files, desktop database and relational databases.

Now you can develop or get developed Business Intelligence applications and do your analysis to know more about your business. You can export the reports/charts to excel,pdf,gif or png images and email it to your business partners or other members of your Business.
You can also copy/send the complete Qlikview document to another machine where Qlikview free personal edition is installed.

And in future as your business grow and you have the right budget, you can get your personal edition converted to a licenced version without affecting your Qlikview Business Intelligence Application that you had created.

But there are some limitations of Qliview personal edition. As your Qlikview is not a licensed one, you cannot ask for any support from Qliktech which I think is not a big issue. You can manage your application without any support which generally is required for big deployments.

Another limitation is that you cannot use an application developed in Licensed version in your personal edition however an application developed in personal edition can be used with a licenced version.
The application developed in a licenced version when opened in personal edition does not load the data hence a reload of the Qlikview application with the fresh data is required which effectively means that the person having the personal edition should have all the data(flat files or excel files) or access to relational databases to reload the application.

Another limitation is that you cannot publish your dashboards over the web to share it with other users as the personal edition does not provide the web component which allows the users to access the application over the web using Internet browsers.
However, you can use utilities like desktop sharing, remote login or web conferences to allow someone to use that application but in that case you will have to expose your complete application. The person accessing the application through remote login can delete the application or make any modifications.

These limitations may not be relevant to most of the Students or Business Owners to use Qlikview personal edition for learning Qlikview or Using for your analysis.

Replacing scattered excel files with one single source of information will be a great benefit in terms of managebility, reusability and productivity which will save lot of your time and efforts.
Top class visualisation in reports and dashboards and ease of perfoming analytic operations like drill down, Top N analysis, Pivoting,identifying problems etc will be an added advantage.

From Qliktech's perspective, they have made a very strategic move and will give them benefits in the coming years and will also help them in growing their prospects base and users base. This will definately make Qliktech's reputation much better in the market and help in developing Brand.

Qliktech's major install base or user base is small business or large business with small deployments and this move will make its presence more stronger in this area. Also, the buyers risk on investment will be greatly reduced.

Not many companies provide free unlimited period evaluation versions of their Busniess Intelligence softwares. I know only one name i.e Oracle. Even SAP Business Objects and IBM Cognos does not provide more than 30 days evaluation.

I am hopeful that Qliktech very soon will appear in Gartner's Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant and will give a direct competition to the bigger vendors.

Manohar Rana

Gartner BI Magic Quadrant 2009

Yesterday just got a chance to look at Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence 2009.
I am really happy to see Qlikview almost touching the Leaders Quadrant Boundary and may be by next year Qlikview will join the leaders club.
So that's a good news for people who have invested in this technology.
This would be really interesting to watch how Qlikview will compete with the leaders. The strong points mentioned by Gartner are OK but I love to look at the weak points because thats the only area where you need to put more efforts and will eventually decide on your success.
1. Lack of statistical and predictive modelling: Thats the key area where Qlikview needs to improve heavily to be able to compete with other leaders. At present, Gartner named some of the competitors as Tibco and some other small products and while doing that it says it is behind them as well. If Qliktech fails to address this quickly before getting into leaders quadrant, it will become very difficult to move forward or maintain its position.
2. The fear of Qliktech being getting acquired will have some impact on the prospects. The prospects will get more cautious and may look for other options which are more certain and safe.
Prospects do not want to suffer from the change in policies, product names, re-architecturing etc and want to play safe wich is fair enough.
3. Gartner feels Qlikview still requires more examples of Large BI deployments and stressed on saying that it has not moved further in this area as compared to last year. I feel this will remain a challenge until Qlikview make some improvements in the architecture to deploy on large environment.
4. The last point may be very dangerous for Qliktech. People who were involved in large deployments understand the importance of Metadata management. making quick reports and good reporting capabilities are good but metadata management is the second pillar on which the deployment stands. If Qliktech fails to address this soon, it will definately be very difficult to get large deployment examples.

You may also want to read Qlikview vs Others which has some discussions on the pros and cons.

This was about Qlikview, the tool which I personally love.
The other interesting things which Gartner mentioned is inclusion of some open source BI tools like Jaspersoft and Pentaho. I hear a lot about Pehtaho and would love to include a review for this in my blog soon but before that I would like to try my hands on that or read some technology information whitepapers.
Now with the inclusion of open source BI, these tools will get some acknowledgement and people will have a choice to look at them as well.
Other open source which I am hearing a lot is Jaspersoft.

Another thing which Gartners mentioned is the SaaS(Software as a Service) BI tools. This may be good for products based on some properitery technology to store the data which has a potential risk of migrating the complete application if customer chooses to shift to a new technology or if the vendor plans to de support or does not provide a way to integrate with other technologies. In that case, customer has absolutely no choice other than to competely rebuild the entire application on different platform which I think will not be an easy and economical task.
I really dont have any idea how SAAS vendors make sure customers investment is not affected if anything of such sort happens. If someone can provide an insight would be helpful.
The new names which I never heard are Pivotlink, Lucid Era and Oco.
to be continued....

Hyperion Interactive Reporting Disadvantages

Hi,

You may want to read my earlier post Qlikview Vs Others


You may also be interested in similar posts.
Hyperion Interactive Reporting Enhancements-Charts

Hyperion Interactive Reporting Enhancements- Live Charts

Hyperion Interactive Reporting Tutorial

Hyperion Interactive Reporting Disadvantages

There are some points which I found Interactive reporting lacks as compared to Qlikview.
This would help users who are evaluating IR and Qlikview.

1. To create a selection box (or LOV) and link it to report objects in the dashboard, we need to write some script and cannot be done with drag and drop features. You can do this using Dashboard studio using wizards but the way you do it in Qlikview is just amaging and even users without having any knowledge of the tool can do it in few seconds. Though in version 11, Oracle has introduced some charts and slider which can be interlinked to see the data changing but needs lots of improvements. Hyperion Web Analysis has this feature present.

2. The way we can do what-if analysis in qlikview with the help of slider and variables is really quick and effective. Nothing of that sort can be done in Interactive Reporting. But the concept is IR is not made for that purpose. The way to do this is Essbase to which we cannot just compare Qlikview.

3. To create pivot reports with member showing(+) sign to further drill down and (-) sign representing the last member is not possible in IR. Qlikview can do this very well.

Manohar Rana

Qlikview Vs Others

Hi,
I have worked on Qlikview version 7 and 8 for one year and now presently working on Oracle BIEE(Siebel Analytics) and Hyperion Essbase system 9. Have done dozens of POC and implementations and Qlikview has gained the same respect everywhere. Personally I just love this tool.

I have mentioned some of the important areas where Qlikview is lacking and you will notice that in the coming releases, Qliktech will try to touch all these areas showing some improvements.

I would like to share some pros and cons:
1. The biggest disadvantage is the amount or size of data. If you have data huge data in hundreds of GB, then qlikview may not be a good choice.Qlikview was having alimit of 2 Billion rows in a table to be loaded before the release of version 9 but now in version 9 it is not there and the size of data directly depends on system RAM. But even now I did not see a guide telling the RAM requirements for a specified amount of data and how does it increase as the amount of data size grows.
still there are some workarounds in certain cases. Design OLAP cubes or Data Marts in your database and keep the logic simple in Qlikview. Rather than creating a huge application, divide into smaller applications and use navigation. But if a single Datamart is huge, Qlikview is not for you.

2. Now speaking for small data sizes, I have observed that it is not the not the pill which cures a patient but it is the diagonosis of a doctor. Dont rapidly start making applications. They may be ready in few days but to manage them could be very difficult and time consuming. plan your needs, take some time to think on it and discuss. when plan is clear in your mind, start working on it.
3. For organisations having data growing rapidly, give a thought to create a datawarehouse with marts designed as per your needs. this will have two advantages. Your qlikview application would be simple and if tommarrow you plan to implement some other BI tool, this will be of great help.
4. few days back, I just heard about Qlikview providing alert capability. i am not sure if alerts can be sent to hand held devices and cell phones. Also check if these alerts can be designed by business users using some wizard or interface. If alerts can be created using API programming, it will really not be useful. I have seen a wizard based alerts available in Qlikview to define an event and sending the content via email.

5. Proprietary files -Another major disadvantage with all the tools storing data in their proprietary files like Qlikview, Essbase and Cognos. Tomorrow if you plan to have another tool for some reporting or if you plan to have another application talk to these cubes(Qliktech may not like to refer its files as cubes which I beleive is nothing else), then there could be a seroius problem. Major vendors generally provides connectors for major Multidimensional sources like Essbase and Cognos but for tools like Qlikview, it Could be difficult.

some of the features where Qlikview lacks are:
1. Alerts- Capability to create alerts and delivers it to not only Email but blackberries, hand held devices, mobile phones etc. In version 9, I heard something for this has come. Also Qlikview do not have any integration with BPEL.
2. Multi user development environment- This feature allows multiple developers work on a single project and the utility synchronises the peices of project each developer is working with the main project.Qlikview completely lacks this feature and until version 9, I did not hear anything about this feature coming up.
3. Connect and extract data from multi dimentional objects- I guess for SAP BW, the connector is available but not for Hyperion Essbase, Cognos Cubes and Microsoft cubes.
4. Export data or metadata to XML- The reports cannot be exported to XML format which is one of the major disadvantage. We can use the XML reports as a data source with another softwares which understands XML.
5. XBRL- Qlikview does not support XBRL. Those who do not understand what is XBRL and why it is required and useful, please read this http://www.xbrl.org/WhatIsXBRL/
6. Seperate component for operational reporting or production reporting or Popularly known as Pixel perfect reporting (for example Printing Salary Cheques) and report bursting like BI publisher(previously XML publisher) or SQR reporting in Hyperion Essbase. But we can argue here in the sense that Qlikview is an analytical tool and is not made for such needs but definately it restricts you somewhere and do not provide you with an option.
7. Integration with Microsoft Office tools- Qlikview just exports the data into an excel file or exports a report object to a png file or using OCX you can do something to make it work with MS office tools(I never tried this). It nowhere stands in comparison with Hyperion Add-In or Cognos Add-In. This is one area which is very important from business users point of view and developing this feature may not be that easy for Qliktech.
8. Support for advance features like embedded browser(available in hyperion Interactive reporting), flickers(rolling messeges) etc as an standard options.
9. Metadata Management- There is no concept of Physical model, Business Model and Presentation Model. There are no subject areas. The End users had access to all the tables loaded to the Qlikview and the matter becomes difficult when you have large number of tables involved. For end users to create a report themselves, they need to identify the tables and columns from this long list which can make things difficult for them. The solution to this could be to create a seperate Qlikview document for every subject area. This greatly effects managebility and reusability. Those who have worked with Oracle BIEE BI Administrator or Cognos Framework manager or Business Objects Universe will understand the importance of subject areas or Packages.
10. Impact Analysis- If you want to make a change in the Qlikview script or datasource and want to know the impact of this change on report objects beforehand, you could be in problem and may have to check each and every report manually and document it.
11. Alternate Hirarchies- No concept of Alternate Hirarchies.
12. SQL Generation- If you want to see the SQL generated behind a query, you can not see that in Qlikview whereas other tools like OBIEE, Cognos, BO and Essbase allows you to see the SQL/MDX generated for a query. This feature may not be relevant to business users but for developers this helps a lot in their day to day activities like debugging or data validation.
13. Resolving circular loops and traps: The only way to resolve circular loopes in Qlikview is to create an alias table wheare as in BO and Cognos you can define contexts which allows you to resolve the circular loops without creating any alias table. When it come to resolving traps like Chasm and Fan traps, Qlikview is helpless.
some more issues -
1. Security- Qlikview does not have a graphical interface to create roles, users and privilages assigning to roles. Also can users be allowed to log in on certain weekdays only. Also can users change their passwords themselves using some interface. Does the password expires automatically after certain no of days and user will be asked to change it.
2. I am not sure if Qlikview can use user directory for external authentication like LDAP database or NTLM. Also can it be used with existing SSO(Single Sign On).
3. Does Qlikview has feature to automatically end the session if it is not being used to avoid any session hacking.
4. Is there any graphical interface to monitor the sessions in use. Check the queries they have fired, previous requests, kill any current requests, monitor time etc.

There are some good features in Qlikview as well:
1. The ability to consolidate the data coming from various sources(databases and flat files) which is in a common format in the data cloud(Qliktech uses this term). this is fantastic. In other OLAP tools sometimes it becomes difficult to join and RDBMS and a flat file data.

2. Many people criticise Qlikview for its associative logic which says the feild names with same names are joined automatically but the designer has the liberty to remove or edit those joins. Even Siebel analytics makes the joins automatically in BI Administrator and Hyperion Essbase sensing same field names.
It helps the designer to see the qualified members for joins and make amendments after verifying them.


Another post regarding Gartners BI Magic Quadrant 2009.
Any comments on this.