Tools of Business Intelligence in QlikView

Introduction

The term business intelligence (BI) represents the tools and various types of system that play a very important role in strategic planning process of the organization. These tools and system allow a company to gather, store, access and analyze data for better decision making. Generally, these tools and systems are beneficial for business intelligence in the area of support, research, segmentation, profitability and better analysis also.

Most companies and business organization collect a large amount of data and big data from their business operations. To maintain the business information, business intelligence used a wide range of software and tools such as Excel files, Microsoft Access and various types of database applications. Use of business intelligence tools make it easy to retrieve information in a timely manner and perform better analysis of data.

The following are types of business intelligence tools:

• QlikView
• Spreadsheets
• OLAP
• Data mining
• Data warehousing
• Dashboards
• Business performance management

Similar to these tools, there are many other business intelligence tools.

QlikView

QlikView is a business services platform that delivers true self services BI. QlikView is an associative experience that provides answers as fast as you can think of a question. QlikView was built with the simple architectural premise that all data should be held in memory and all calculations should be performed based on the user's requirements. Twenty years ago it was not possible. QlikView was founded in 1993.

QlikView is a patented technology based on an extremely efficient in-memory data model. QlikView allows the user to work with millions of cells of data and still responds to queries in less then a second. Basically it is a business technology showing how the data will be performed using charts, tables and so on. Mainly the QlikView brand delivers software and services that make data a natural part of how people decide and act. It is Business Intelligence (BI) Software.

QlikView is revolutionizing business intelligence with fast, powerful and visual analysis that is simple to use. QlikView offers all of the features of “traditional” analytics solutions like dashboards and alerts, multi-dimensional analyses, slice-and-dice of data, without the limitations, cost or complexity of traditional BI applications. QlikView solutions can be executed in days, users can be trained in minutes, and end users get results instantly. It is software that enables many kinds of users from beginners to experts to retrieve data easily from any source like SQL Server, Oracle, and Excel file, XML or Text Files.

Features

The following are some essential features of QlikView.

Analysis Engine

The QlikView analysis engine is more important for the analysis of the data. It holds all the data loaded on a transaction level and this data is part of the QVW file (QlikView file format). The analyst data can be stored in RAM.

Selection Engine

The Selection Engine processes the user interface and returns the desired result to that query. It provides a very few minute response time on queries, in other words made to the in Memory Data Model.

The Chart and Table Engine

The Chart and Table Engine handles the calculation and graphic display of the charts in the user interface. It calculates multiple "cubes" in real time and it promotes the user selections directly in graphs. There are at least one cube for each graph in the application.

Clients

The QlikView supported clients include an installed Windows EXE client that connects to the QlikView server and the ActiveX component integrates with other software.

Security

The data in a QlikView application is often confidential and then you need to control the access to the data.

Spreadsheets

A spreadsheet is an interactive tools of business intelligence. That can be used to retrieve information. It is an interactive computer application program for business organizations. A spreadsheet can be used to analyze business organization data in tabular form. It is developed as paper accounting worksheets. A spreadsheet operates on data represented as cells of an array, that is organized in rows and columns.

Now, the spreadsheet replaces the paper based system in business organizations. A spreadsheet also provides arithmetic and mathematical functions and also describes common financial and statistical operations. First, when spreadsheets were first developed, the use of spreadsheets were only for accounting and bookkeeping tasks. Now in today's era, it is used for an entire business organization.

Use of spreadsheets

There are a variety of uses of spreadsheets.

• A spreadsheet consists of a table of cells arranged in rows and columns, then it is easy for organizing data into tabular form. 
• Most spreadsheet applications are known as workbooks. A workbook is a file containing all the data for the spreadsheet and a book.
  
• Better user interactivity with spreadsheets because it is very easy and simple for use, everyone can use it easily.
  
• Spreadsheets contain many principles of databases.
  
• It can be used for better business productivity and also decision making.

This picture shows spreadsheet data.

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is computer processing that enables a user to extract and view data from various points of view in an easy manner. OLAP data is stored in a multidimensional database and also relational database. It supports many attributes, like products, sales and time and shows these attributes in separate dimensions. OLAP software displays the intersection of dimensions. OLAP can be used with data mining. An OLAP database does not consider large databases.

OLAP mainly considers the following three basic operations:

• Consolidation
• Drill down
• Slicing and dicing

Example of OLAP

Hyperion Solution's Essbase, Oracle's Express Server.

Types of OLAP

There are the following two types of OLAP.

• Multidimensional Online Analytical Processing (MOLAP)
• Relational Online Analytical Processing (ROLAP)

Multidimensional online analytical processing (MOLAP)

Multidimensional Online Analytical Processing is generally known as OLAP. It is classic term of OLAP. Multidimensional Online Analytical Processing (MOLAP) stores data in multi-dimensional arrays rather than in a relational database.

Advantages of MOLAP

• It provides fast query performance due to optimized storage like multidimensional storage.
  
• It is very compact for low-dimension data sets.

Disadvantages of MOLAP

• It is not suitable with query models.
  
• Data redundancy is the main drawback of MOLAP.

ROLAP (Relational online analytical processing)

This type of OLAP works directly with relational databases. The main data of business organizations are stored in relational tables. A relational database holds the aggregate information.

Data Mining

Generally Data mining is known as "Knowledge Discovery". It is the process of analyzing data from various perspectives and summarizing it into useful information. It is one of the most important tools of business intelligence that can be used to analyze data. Data mining is the process of finding co-relations and patterns in a relational database.

Elements of data mining

There are the following five types of elements of data mining.

• Extract
• Store
• Provide
• Analyzes
• Represents

Extract : Extract and load transaction data onto the data warehouse system.

Store: Stores data into multidimensional database systems.

Provide: It provides data access to business analysts and professionals.

Analyzes: It analyzes the data by application software.

Represents: It represents the data in a graph or a table.

Data warehousing

A data warehouse is a relational or multidimensional database that is designed for query and analysis. It is not used in transactional processing. Data warehousing is a database used for reporting and data analysis. It combines data from one or more sources. It stores current and historical data for reports. The data stored in the data warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems such as marketing, sales and so on.

Features of data warehouse

• The data warehouse has control of the power of the data load.
  
• It uses a large amount of historical data.
  
• It improves performance.
  
• It uses queries to often retrieve large amounts of data.

Challenges of data warehouse

• It should have a better understanding of user requirements.
  
• Manages the warehouse.
  
• Cleaning historical data.
  
• Finding data from internal and external data sources.

Dashboard

The QlikView provides one-click access for the interactive dashboard; anyone can access it quickly and modify it easily. The QlikView Business Intelligence dashboard targets task-specific apps. The dashboard display measures are visualized as meters, we create a dashboard in QlikView by combining one or more meters. The dashboard shows the alerts and notification for target values.

Use of dashboard

• Dashboard programs are written in a graphical manner so it is easy for the user to access it.
  
• The dashboard handles a large amount of business data.
  
• Dashboard programs are user friendly.

Business performance management

The business performance management is the set of activities in which goals are met in an effective and efficient manner. The business intelligence defines a framework for key performance indicators. The performance measures target and objectives and it supports planning. It is a set of management. It supports business performance to achieve one or more business goals.

The following are the activities of business performance management:

• Improves business performance.
• Better selection of business goals.
• Consolidation.
• Measures how businesses can better reach their goals.

Summary

This article provides an introduction to business intelligence and also describes various tools of business intelligence.