Hands-On Business Intelligence with Qlik Sense

Implement self-service data analytics with insights and guidance from Qlik Sense experts

Pablo Labbe, Clever Anjos, Kaushik Solanki, Jerry DiMaso

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781789800944
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789800593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Inteligencia empresarial

Create dynamic dashboards to bring interactive data visualization to your enterprise using Qlik Sense

Key Features

• Implement various Qlik Sense features to create interactive dashboards
• Analyze data easily and make business decisions faster using Qlik Sense
• Perform self-service data analytics and geospatial analytics using an example-based approach

Book Description

Qlik Sense allows you to explore simple-to-complex data to reveal hidden insights and data relationships to make business-driven decisions.

Hands-On Business Intelligence with Qlik Sense begins by helping you get to grips with underlying Qlik concepts and gives you an overview of all Qlik Sense's features. You will learn advanced modeling techniques and learn how to analyze the data loaded using a variety of visualization objects. You'll also be trained on how to share apps through Qlik Sense Enterprise and Qlik Sense Cloud and how to perform aggregation with AGGR. As you progress through the chapters, you'll explore the stories feature to create data-driven presentations and update an existing story. This book will guide you through the GeoAnalytics feature with the geo-mapping object and GeoAnalytics connector. Furthermore, you'll learn about the self-service analytics features and perform data forecasting using advanced analytics. Lastly, you'll deploy Qlik Sense apps for mobile and tablet.

By the end of this book, you will be well-equipped to run successful business intelligence applications using Qlik Sense's functionality, data modeling techniques, and visualization best practices.

What you will learn

• Discover how to load, reshape, and model data for analysis
• Apply data visualization practices to create stunning dashboards
• Make use of Python and R for advanced analytics
• Perform geo-analysis to create visualizations using native objects
• Learn how to work with AGGR and data stories

Who this book is for

If you're a data analyst, BI developer, or interested in business intelligence and want to gain practical experience of working on Qlik Sense, this book is for you. You'll also find it useful if you want to explore Qlik Sense's next-generation applications for self-service business intelligence. No prior experience of working with Qlik Sense is required.

Section 1: Qlik Sense and Business Intelligence

In this section, we shall introduce business intelligence (BI), the modern concepts raised in the early days, and setting up Qlik Sense products for upcoming projects.

This section shall contain only one chapter:

• Chapter 1, Getting started with Qlik Sense

Getting Started with Qlik Sense

In today's consumer-driven world, with tremendous competition and rapidly-developing technologies, it is imperative for organizations to leverage data to drive decision-making across all aspects of business to lower costs, increase revenues, and mitigate risks. However, this is much easier said than done; there are hundreds of tools and technologies available in today's market that collect, process, and serve data, but choosing the right technologies is often a challenge. In this book, we discuss one particular technology that provides an enterprise solution for processing and serving analytics: Qlik Sense.

Qlik Sense is a data-discovery and analytics platform composed of an in-memory associative database, a data-extraction and transformation engine that connects to dozens of data sources natively, an intuitive self-service data-modeling and visualization tool, and a set of open APIs that allow for complex customizations of workflow and visualizations. Qlik is a nine-time leader in the Gartner Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform Magic Quadrant (https://www.qlik.com/us/gartner-magic-quadrant-business-intelligence) and competes in the business intelligence (BI) market as a complete solution for enterprise analytics. Today, Qlik Sense is being used actively in virtually every industry, in hospitals, banks, manufacturing plants, and everywhere in between, to serve up analytics to users so they can make better decisions that drive better outcomes.

Qlik Sense is a self-contained platform that facilitates all aspects of operating. It is an expanding analytics organization, and as such includes a wide variety of features and functionality, from advanced administrative capabilities to self-service visualization elements to artificial intelligence (AI) engines. This breadth of capabilities, combined with continuing acquisitions of complementary software, such as Podium Data for data cataloging and CrunchBot for natural language processing (NLP), is what helps to differentiate Qlik in the analytics and BI space and provide a truly scalable analytics solution that can serve dozens or hundreds of thousands of users.

In this chapter, we will focus on getting started with Qlik Sense with the Qlik Sense Desktop application and the Qlik Sense Cloud web-based application. We'll provide a quick overview of the high-level features of Qlik Sense, so that it's clear how the Qlik Sense Platform can be leveraged for individuals and in the enterprise, then we will jump into using Qlik Sense.

We will cover the following topics:

• An overview of the Qlik Sense product
• The Associative Engine
• Setting up Qlik Sense Desktop
• Setting up Qlik Sense Cloud
• Self-service with Qlik Sense

An overview of the Qlik Sense product

This chapter will provide an overview of several of the major facets of the Qlik Sense software and what you need to understand to get started with Qlik Sense. We will not be covering the administration components or delving too deep into the advanced extensibility capabilities, but, by the end of this chapter, you will understand what Qlik Sense is and how you can use it.

The components of Qlik Sense

In the following sections, we will cover four major components of the Qlik Sense software:

• In-memory associative database
• The Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) engine:
  • Data manager
  • Script
  • Data model
• The visualization platform:
  • The hub
  • Applications
  • Sheets
  • Objects
• API and extensibility capabilities

In-memory associative database

Qlik's in-memory associative database is the proprietary technology that Qlik invented in 1993 in Lund, Sweden, which allows large amounts of data to be compressed, stored in the RAM, and rapidly traversed in the Qlik Sense client. In other words, this is what makes Qlik, Qlik.

This database houses all of the data we need inside the Qlik Engine and allows us to explore the datasets in a way that facilitates analytics in a much better manner. We'll get into how and why this approach is better in the next section, The Associative Engine.

ETL engine

Qlik Sense includes a built-in ETL engine that allows us to connect to many different sources, such as Excel, SQL, and Hadoop, to extract data into Qlik Sense. We can also use this ETL engine to transform the data, to manipulate the data, to clean up dirty data, or to create new data.

This is a very powerful component of the Qlik platform because we don't have to leave Qlik to do mappings, create buckets, or fix bad data; we can do everything we need right inside Qlik Sense, and there is even an intuitive user interface that guides users with no programming knowledge required.

Data manager

The Qlik Sense Data manager provides a way to pull data into Qlik Sense through an intuitive user interface. It contains a way to connect to your data sources, select the data you are looking to analyze, pull the data in, and link it to other data you have pulled in. Using Qlik's Cognitive Engine, and AI created by Qlik, the Qlik Sense Data manager automatically profiles your data and recommends how to connect different tables based on similar data keys. We'll go further into this profiling capability and how to transform data in the Self-service with Qlik Sense section at the end of this chapter.

Script

For more advanced users, the Qlik Sense script provides the capability to programmatically extract and transform data from data sources. It uses a scripting language similar to SQL and allows more granular control over how the data is extracted and transformed. Most users will use the Data manager, but it is important to note that this capability exists for users who need to transform data in more complex ways:

The preceding screenshot is of the Qlik Sense script setting a variable with the Today() function and loading a table from a QVD, which is a proprietary Qlik data file that is optimized for use in Qlik. Most users will not leve...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• About Packt
• Contributors
• Preface
• Section 1: Qlik Sense and Business Intelligence
• Getting Started with Qlik Sense
• Section 2: Data Loading and Modeling
• Loading Data in Qlik Sense
• Implementing Data Modeling Techniques
• Section 3: Building an Analytical Application
• Working with Application Structure
• Creating a Sales Analysis App Using Qlik Sense
• Interacting with Advanced Expressions
• Creating Data Stories
• Section 4: Additional Features
• Engaging On-Demand App Generation
• Creating a Native Map Using GeoAnalytics
• Working with Self-Service Analytics
• Data Forecasting Using Advanced Analytics
• Deploying Qlik Sense Apps for Mobile/Tablets
• Other Books You May Enjoy