See Your Data With the QVD LooQer

Using the QVD LooQer

The QVD LooQer (“looker”) provides fast and convenient viewing and indexing of QVD (Qlik data file) contents; this utility is freely available to all Qlik Sense and QlikView customers via Qlik Branch and GitHub as part of TSEEQ (pronounced “seek”), The Structured ETL Engine for Qlik.

The QVD LooQer traverses a user-specified directory tree to find all QVDs (via the Refresh List button); the user then selects the target QVD via a drop-down list and then clicks LooQ at QVD to see the QVD contents.   As shown in the screen shot above, several copies of the QVD LooQer can be created for concurrent viewing of multiple QVDs within a single tiled window, thereby enabling exploration of a multi-table data set, before that data is linked in a Qlik data model.

QVD LooQer is implemented with Qlik and therefore has The Power of Gray; associations between QVDs, fields, and folders are easy to identify and analyze.

Downloading the QVD LooQer

The QVD LooQer is currently distributed as part of TSEEQ (pronounced “seek”), The Structured ETL Engine for Qlik. To obtain the QVD LooQer, simply:

  1. Download the Source code (zip) file for the newest TSEEQ release.
  2. Unzip the downloaded file and navigate to the resulting ~\Utility\QVD LooQer subfolder.

Please do not be scared by the term “source code” as used by GitHub; the QVD LooQer is distributed as a QlikView QVW contained within the “source code” zip file; no compilation is required!

If you are not a QlikView user, please download the no-cost QlikView Personal Edition to run the QVD LooQer QVW. While it is implemented as a QlikView QVW, the QVD LooQer can open QVDs created by both Qlik Sense and QlikView.

Additional Notes

  1. If prompted about Module Security, please click Allow Safe Macros and then click OK. (1st screen shot below)
  2. If prompted about an embedded license, please simply click OK. (2nd screen shot below)
  3. QVD LooQer is a viewing tool; it does not have any UI-based data editing capability. (For bulk changing of values, we recommend using Qlik transformations, which can be added to the post-processing script section of the QVD LooQer).

We wish your success with the QVD LooQer; please contact us with any questions!

Seek and Ye Shall Find: Introducing the Structured ETL Engine for Qlik

TSEEQ (pronounced “seek”), The Structured ETL Engine for Qlik, implements centralized management of Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) operations that provide data to Qlik applications. TSEEQ is quite simply a rule-based ETL engine built specifically for QlikView and Qlik Sense.

For more information on the concept of rule-based ETL engines, please see the companion article on LinkedIn, “Thrones, Castles, and Catapults: The Value of Rule-Based ETL Engines in BI Projects“.

If you’re interested in implementing TSEEQ right now, without having to sift through my ramblings in the the rest of this blog post, please just click this GitHub link and download the Source code (zip) file for the most recent release.

Now, on to my ramblings…  A logical question is, “why did Qlik Consulting create TSEEQ?”  The answer is, we created  TSEEQ to accomplish the following goals:

  • Governance: ETL operations are defined in external (and therefore very manageable) rule sets.
  • Self-Service: Business users may easily define and modify ETL operations in sandbox environments.
  • Performance: A comprehensive profiler enables efficient ETL execution.
  • Migration:  ETL rule sets for QlikView can be used without modification for Qlik Sense (and vice versa).
  • Productivity: The core ETL engine and its surrounding utilities automate time-consuming tasks.

TSEEQ In Comparison to Traditional Embedded Scripting

The distinguishing characteristic of TSEEQ versus Traditional Embedding Scripting (TES) is that in TSEEQ, externalized rules (diagram above) provide a structured source of ETL control; in TES (diagram below), free-form textual ETL script is embedded within Qlik application files (QVWs in QlikView and QVFs in Qlik Sense).

Note: TSEEQ and TES are not mutually exclusive; a hybrid approach is useful in many cases. TSEEQ is available for download from GitHub.

In future blog posts, we will delve into configuration and use of TSEEQ; if you are anxious to get started right away, please do take a look at the documentation PDF for some pointers!