QlikView version 10 – coming soon….

I finally saw the demo of QlikView version 10 this week, presented by Anthony Deighton of QlikTech. And I am chomping at the proverbial bit to get my hands on it. The official launch date is 10/10/10 (cute).

A number of impressive new features are included, and a few in particular stood out

• Metrics in list boxes – extending the existing feature of allowing a frequency metric in a list box, you can now put in any metric (presumably through the Expression Editor which wasn’t shown). You can even do a microchart. I’m not entirely sure how this is conceptually different from the existing Straight Table object…perhaps the list boxes quicker to configure? At a minimum though, I could this as being a handy feature when profiling new data sources (I’ll take this up in a future blog topic.)
  
• Container objects – a great way to better manage screen “real estate.” This will get around the hassle of setting up icon minimize/maximize cycles. And moreover I think the selection options presented in the Container object will be more obvious to business users who are new to any given application.
• Mekko charts – hmmm… I’m not sure how useful these will be. I mean, I get the fact that now another “degree of freedom” can be encoded in a two-dimensional bar/column chart (by varying the bar width with an additional expression). I get it, bravo, well done. …But, I’m just not sure how easy they will be for the “average bear” to interpret. I’ll be interested to put these in front of some business users and get their feedback.
• Extensions are a new feature that, well…extend the existing functionality. One of the extensions I could see using is the Gantt chart. The other ones I saw looked like more “eye candy” than anything. I’m sure Stephen Few will have some priceless and spot-on comments on these 

In addition to gobs of GUI goodness, there are also some impressive changes coming to the ETL scripting and server administration:

• Multi-threaded reloads – yay! Now I can get my money’s worth on that 16-core processor!
• Easier user administration in QV Server – my admin will love me!
• Version control … although, before getting too excited on deploying this, it will certainly need a test drive (check out the commentary at Guerrilla BI).
• Other improvements to the scripting tool – I heard “type-ahead completion” mentioned, but didn’t catch whether that was to be in v.10 or not

SO…get ready…10/10/10 !