Summary: A look at techniques to reduce the memory footprint of your Qlik Data Models. There are good reasons to reduce the memory footprint of your Qlik Apps. Smaller Apps tend to perform better and require fewer server resources. Qlik Cloud imposes size quotas and there is a financial cost to exceeding the quota. In ..read more

Summary: I explain the mystery of why sometimes script fieldname changes flow through to expressions and sometimes not. When adding a new field to an existing Qlik Script Load statement, where do you insert the new field in the field list? Top, bottom, alphabetically? Where you insert the new field can break existing chart expressions ..read more

We just wrapped up a great Qlik Connect conference in Orlando. I was intrigued by the discussions of what AI may mean to the future of our industry. I found the panel with the AI Council especially stimulating, some great minds sharing their research and perspectives. I was especially struck by the common refrain that “we know AI will impact our businesses, but there is much unknown as to exactly what this will look like”. I’m of the mind that if we don’t know, let’s start working through some thought experiments. A potential that came up for me is: Generative AI, specifically RAG and private ..read more

Longish post today where I show off the power of QSDA Pro to reduce Qlik App resources, saving you money and creating a more responsive experience for your users. As a follow on to my last post “Help! My Qlik Cloud Reload Exceeds Quota!” I’m going to dive deeper into the available QSDA features to reduce memory requirements of a Qlik App. As a bonus we’ll use QSDA to improve the performance of a chart. There are many good reasons to optimize your Qlik Apps to a leaner size. Smaller apps tend to perform better and place less demand on your server resources. If you are a Qlik Cloud customer, or ..read more

If you are a Qlik Cloud (SaaS) customer you may have seen this dreaded message during script reload. Ack! Ack! Your quota may be different than 25Mb, but the problem remains the same. How do I modify this application to fit within my subscribed quota? QSDA Pro V3.1 to the the rescue! QSDA analyzes your app and provides recommendations and easy to use tooling to drop unused data and optimize the remaining data, potentially greatly reducing the size of your Qlik App. QSDA needs a successfully loaded app for analysis, so our first step is to reload the app using the “Limited load” feature of the ..read more

In this post I’m going to show some tips for formatting intervals / durations in Qlik. Datetimes in Qlik utilize a serial number that equals the number of days since December 30, 1899. The integer value represents the day and the fractional value represents the time of the day. The difference between two datetimes is an interval or duration. Qlik provides the Interval function to format numeric interval values as dual strings for display. Interval() may be used both in charts and script. The Interval function accepts an optional format string that specifies the output format. An example interv ..read more

QSDA Pro 2.6 is available now and a new feature is Flag Levels. Each flag type is assigned a level of Info, Warning or Error with a matching color. Color helps you focus on what’s important. Flag Levels may be customized and refined for your requirements using the new Admin > Project Config page. QSDA 2.6 also adds three new flags: “Calculated Dimension“.  The default level for this flag is Warning.  “No Application Thumbnail“. The default level for this flag is Warning.  “Missing Theme“. The default level for this flag is Error. A missing theme can occur when moving an App ..read more

Summary: For the data viz nerds among us, I share my fascination with a groundbreaking data viz project at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. In Tim Harford’s excellent book “The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics” the author mentions a set of infographics produced by W.E.B. Du Bois and assistants for the 1900 Paris Exhibition. The “Exhibition of American Negroes” is a powerful collection of photographs and data visualization that provide a strong counter to racist propaganda and ignorance of the time. I encourage you to explore the entire contents of the exhibit, but in this p ..read more

Masters Summit New Qlik Cloud Track! The Masters Summit Team is developing all new courses for 2024. The new content is focused on: Qlik Cloud (perfect for clients who are on or moving to cloud already, or evaluating a migration). New capabilities in the platform, like AutoML, Automation, etc. Before we get too far down the road, we want your input to gauge interest. We are opening pre-registration for our 2024 conferences: Vienna, Austria – October 02-04 Pre-register for Vienna now Philadelphia, USA – November 04-06 Pre-register for Philadelphia now If you or o ..read more

Here’s a fun Friday post. As I was updating my incremental load materials for the upcoming October/November Masters Summit for Qlik, I ran across an old note about creating “Attributes” in QVDs using Tags. Due to a bug in QVD generation I couldn’t implement the idea at the time. But the bug is long since fixed so here I present the general idea of “QVD Attributes” (my name, not an official Qlik thing). We can assign Tags to Qlik Tables using the script TAG statement: Tag TABLE TranData with 'MaxId=$(vMaxId)'; Tag TABLE TranData with 'Source=Salesforce'; If the table “TranData” is subsequently ..read more