Book review: QlikView Your Business
Just finished reading a recently published book for QlikView developers and super users QlikView Your Business: An expert guide to Business Discovery with QlikView and Qlik Sense by Oleg Troyansky, Tammy Gibson and Charlie Leichtweis.
I met Oleg Troyansky at Qlik World Conference in Orlando in 2014 and exchanged a couple emails with him before. I read his blog and learned a lot from it. I knew that Oleg contributed a lot of his time to Qlik community forum since 2005 and has been using Qlikview since 2002. Needless to say, my expectations were pretty high.
Please do not be fooled by the name of the book - it might give you an impression that the book was written for business users only. It is not. It is truly an expert guide which will take your skills to the next level.
The books starts easy on you, explaining basic concepts but it is important and unique in a way that these concepts are explained in the context of real business problems.
Newbies will certainly appreciate step-by-step assignments, neatly formatted code that you can actually read and a lot of illustrations.
Being very picky about UI and design, I enjoyed the choice of colors, fonts and the neat and clean design of the book and example dashboards.
By the time you finish the book, you will master very advanced concepts (and they are not for the fainthearted!)
To name a few:
- Concatenated tables to store multiple fact tables vs. linked fact tables
- Generic link tables
- "as of date" tables
- Advanced set analysis expressions built dynamically on the fly
- Numerous recommendations on how to optimize performance for large data sets
- Expressions reuse using external files
While I was familiar with most of these concepts, it was really helpful to see how to apply them to real business problems. Not only authors did a great job explaining these tough techniques, they suggested a lot of hints and took time to provide alternative options, not forcing readers to pick the only "right" one, but encouraging them to choose the best method given the circumstances.
As experienced certified QlikView developer and after reading countless blogs, 5 QlikView books, hundreds of white papers and forum posts, I still learned a lot from this book. I can relate to everything that Oleg and his colleagues explain in the book. I appreciate that authors teach reader the best practices and explain the pitfalls and dangers of quick and dirty methods that I see a lot.
Has the book met my high expectations? My answer is absolutely! Really great job, Oleg and the team! I will recommend this book now to my colleagues and I think your book will take the first place now for me. My old favorite book QlikView 11 for Developers by Miguel García and Barry Harmsen would have to take the second place!
Both books are great and I think you have to have both if you are serious about QlikView development!