Today I am going to let you in on a big secret.
People often ask me how I always get great performance and fast response times out of my QlikView applications. I usually put on a very serious face and reply that this is the result of years of experience. Experience gained by doing hundreds of implementations, practice, experiment, study and continually refining my skills and knowledge.
You won’t believe how hard it is to not burst out laughing when I tell this to people. The fact of the matter is that it is all a gimmick!
There is only one simple trick that you need to know to instantly boost your QlikView performance. This is the secret that Qlik and the Qlik Illuminati don’t want you to know, but today I will reveal it all!
Are you ready for the truth? Here it comes!
Keep the lines short and straight
There, I said it. Keeping the lines in your data model as short and straight as possible will instantly boost the performance of your QlikView application. Consider the data model below, it has very long lines between the tables and none of them are straight:
This data model was laid out use the Auto-Layout function, clear proof that Qlik wants you to build suboptimal data models so they and their partners can sell you expensive performance tuning services!
“Why is this important?” you may ask. Well, every time you make a selection in QlikView, the logical inference engine automatically associates the relevant data within the entire data model.
The longer the lines between tables are, the longer it will take the data to travel through that line.
Furthermore:
Sharp angles in the lines between tables also decrease performance, as the data will have to slow down to travel around corners.
Now consider the alternative data model below. The lines are short and straight. In the case of this model,
Making the lines 50 times shorter resulted in 5000% better performance!
But wait, there’s more!
Protip: Gravity is your friend
Some times it is not possible to have completely straight lines. For example when there are many tables in your data model. In that case, placing your dimension tables below your fact tables will add a gravity boost, the data will effectively fall down through the line.
Protip 2: Make the lines wider for even better performance
While you could have figured out the previous tips by experimenting, there is one final performance tweak that, up to now, has only been made available to the most elite of QlikView Partners. The so-called fat pipe mod makes the lines much wider, greatly increasing the amount of data that can ‘flow’ through the line at the same time.
The ‘fat pipe mod’ enabled on a data model. Notice how much wider the lines are.
Want to apply this amazing mod to your own QlikView installation? Scroll down for more information…
… almost there …
Hopefully you had already guessed this before you scrolled this far, but of course there is no silver bullet when it comes to QlikView performance. However there are many tips, tricks, techniques and methods that combined can significantly improve the quality and performance of your QlikView applications and increase your effectiveness as a developer.
One place where you can learn about these tips, tricks, techniques and methods is at the Masters Summit for QlikView. This 3 day training event is designed to take your skills to the next level with sessions about Data Modeling, Scripting, Advanced Expressions & Aggregations, Data Visualization and much more.
The next edition of the Masters Summit is held from May 4 to 6 in San Francisco. Besides the core sessions, new sessions focusing on Qlik Sense for QlikView Customers and NPrinting have been added to this edition.
Even better, if you register before April 15th you will receive a $300 early bird discount, and that is no joke…