Tag: qvs

Collaboration Metadata And More

IMPORTANT NOTE

You may need to edit the CONNECT string to provide the full file path to the DLL. The default location in QlikView 11.2 SR3 is on the C: drive – Program Files\QlikView

An edited CONNECT string would look like this:

CUSTOM CONNECT TO “Provider=C:\Program Files\QlikView\QvsAdminDataProvider.dll;host=corp-qlikview-t;XUserId=****;XPassword=****;”;

Thanks to Ronnie Taborn for this solution!

 

 

If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a nifty feature in the QlikView version 10 to pull metadata from the repository into a QVW.

The metadata are related to applications (QVW documents) in AccessPoint and the server objects that users can create. Specifically:

  • Documents – names, sizes, AccessPoint properties
  • Document attributes – if you assign custom attributes in the QVS Management Console
  • Collaboration (a.k.a. “server”) objects – creator, types, properties

These metadata are not available in the Ops Monitor app (as far as I know), so this new feature is more than just a convenience.

 

Creating the script

Adding these fields to the load script is super-simple, thanks to a new option in the datasource selection drop-down menu – QvsAdminDataProvider.dll (32)

 

  1. Choose the QvsAdminDataProvider.dll (32) from the drop-down menu
  2. Click the “Connect” button to add the connect string into your script
  3. Click Select to bring up the Select Wizard
  4. Choose all fields from all tables and include the Preceding Load option

A few tweaks…

I made a couple of small tweaks to the script for convenience:

Rather than expressing the document size (DocumentList.FileSize) in bytes, I converted it to kilobytes using this code:
round(num(replace(FileSize,'.',''), '#') / 1024, 1) AS [File Size (kB)]

 

And I plucked the username out of the CollaborationMetadata.OwnerName:
subField(CollaborationOwner, '\', 2) AS OwnerName

 

Now reload the script! Your data model should look like this:

 

Using the objects

The simplest use case is to create table boxes and a few selectors. The Document List and Collaboration Objects are well-suited for tabular display. Here I’ve done a little renaming and formatting:

 

What else could we do with this?

Now we can start having fun! With these new metadata available for collaboration objects, we can measure aspects of our QlikView program such as:

  • Which applications get customized the most? (i.e. the most server objects created)
  • Which users are creating the most server objects?
  • What percent of our user base is sharing their server objects?

Here are just a few visualizations to serve as examples:

(this would be more meaningful with more than one user!! 🙂 )

 

Hope these examples get you thinking about ways to incorporate these metadata into the monitoring and improvement of your QlikView program.

Keep on Qlikin’

Bill

 

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QlikView under the hood

One of the great sessions at Q Days 2010 San Diego (yesterday!) was “QlikView Under the Hood,” presented by Daniel English of the Product team.

I’m a scientist at heart and really like to know how things tick. Sure, it’s rewarding to deliver a stunning dashboard to my business partner and hear them say “wow” or “we didn’t have this type of intell before” … but, in the back of my mind I’m wondering “how much RAM is this really consuming?”  🙂

So, this session addressed some questions. The two big takeaways for me were:

  1. QV Server (QVS) caching – if you happen to be sitting around, watching the Perf Mon on your QVS machine you will likely notice RAM activity growing and growing. And then freak out that QVS is leaky. Well, it turns out, this is exactly the correct behavior for QVS. What happens is that when a document is opened, and the user starts clicking or changing tabs, each of those results (aggregations) get cached. And QVS will continue to cache until all the available RAM is consumed or the document times-out from disuse. (Or if the QVS is rebooted – duh.) If another document comes into scope, or another user starts asking different question of the same document, then QVS starts dropping cached aggregates to make room for the new stuff. (How it drops it was not specified – oldest first? or least re-used first?)
  2. “Associative” – what does this really mean? Is it just marketing hype? Without debating the semantics, QlikView’s model is a very unique, very novel concept. Here’s how I think of it, in good old-fashioned SQL terms… Imagine I write a SQL query with every table in my data mart – every fact, every dimension. And I have join conditions to join every table (using a full outer join). And then I start dynamically changing bits of the WHERE clause. That is what associative analysis means. And we change the WHERE clause in QlikView, figuratively speaking, by clicking on selectors.

So yeah, Associative really does mean something different than most SQL query tools. Unless of course your SQL tools allows you to query every table in your mart simultaneously 🙂

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