On the Pink Floyd album “Music from the Film More” (1969) there is a song "Green Is the Colour". It is a ballad typical of the early Pink Floyd. And it is still good. Listen to it, when you can.
Given the title, it could have been QlikView's song. There is no color so associated with QlikView as green. Green is the QlikView brand. Green is how you interact with QlikView, how you focus on a piece of information, how you ask questions. You click and it turns green. And the answer to your question turns up in white. It is so easy.
Green and White. Everything is ordered, simple and beautiful.
Then - enter the black swan: Gray, the color that adds spice to QlikView. After all, green is just a query filter setting and white is just a query result. Anyone can do that! But Gray...
Gray is the color that reveals the unexpected. Gray is the color that creates insight. Gray is the color that creates new questions. Gray is an important part of making the QlikView experience an associative one — a data dialogue and an information interaction, rather than just a database query. Showing you that something is excluded when you didn't expect it is answering questions you didn't ask. This surprise creates new knowledge in a way that only a true Business Discovery platform can.
One of the first times that I went to a prospect to sell QlikView we were at a pharmaceutical company where physicians wanted to analyze their clinical trials database. We connected to the database and were up and running in just a few minutes. I clicked on one of their coming products and we could see the countries where studies of this product were in progress. But one major European country was grayed out when I clicked...
The audience was silent. This information obviously came as a surprise.
“Oh, it does not matter," someone said. "We can get the product approved there using the studies from other countries."
“No!" someone else said. "It is a large market. We need a study there for marketing purposes!"
Needless to say, they initiated a study also in that country.
Things have not changed. QlikView still helps people discover their data and their business. And gray is a crucial part of the discovery process. Therefore I feel uneasy when I get questions like “How do I hide the gray values?” I always try to persuade the developer to leave the gray values visible, because my view on this is firm: Showing excluded values is an important part of the QlikView experience. Don’t hide them!
Green may be the Colour, but Gray makes the Difference.
HIC
One of our colleagues at Attivio has a niece and nephew who are as fluent in Japanese as they are in English. Their mom is Japanese and their dad is American, so they have a completely bilingual household. In one moment they might talk to each other in English, their Mom or Dad might call to them from another room in Japanese, and they will answer in kind, switching between their two languages as easily as switching TV channels.
Unified information access (UIA) technology is a lot like being strongly bilingual, in that UIA also quickly and easily communicates information that spans different worlds — specifically, structured data (databases) and unstructured content (documents/text), whether from internal and external sources.
Just as our colleague's niece and nephew can communicate as easily with anyone when visiting Japan as they can at home, a true UIA platform can also freely communicate with disparate information sources and with other applications; particularly BI tools, self-service dashboards and analytic systems. Doing so requires supporting the widely-used SQL (Structured Query Language) standard, via ODBC/JDBC connectivity.
Background
Much energy and effort has gone into the production of tools and technologies to analyze data. From iPhone and iPad apps to spreadsheets, reporting tools, "self-service" dashboards, various analytic systems, right on up to full-blown ad-hoc drag & drop BI tools, we live in an era where everything is analyzed, and the tools we use for that analysis actually contribute to better decisions. One of the keys to the interoperability of this huge ecosystem is a standards-based approach: the broad use of the Structured Query Language (SQL) is the reason the eco-system exists.
The downside to many of these tools is that they operate only on so-called structured data — until recently, ignoring valuable context contained in unstructured sources. Without an integrated and fully correlated view of the complete picture, organizations will miss out on a much wider world of business insights and understanding; not unlike relying on a really bad language interpreter (poor Bill Murray!):
Unified Information Access
Fortunately, Attivio’s Active Intelligence Enging (AIE) gives you “the best of both worlds.” Because AIE supports querying in SQL via ODBC and JDBC, organizations can use it to explore all information regardless of source or format. By deploying AIE as a back-end unified information source, your users can continue to use BI and other tools they are comfortable with — but now with the added ability to access a far more complete business informational picture, for more informed decisions and deeper understanding that is simply not possible working with structured or unstructured information alone.
One key to making this happen: Active Intelligence SQL (AI-SQL) - a set of full-text function extensions to SQL. AI-SQL functions make it easy for SQL query authors to incorporate AIE's unique features including operations like:
The fulltextsearch function enables blended search and analytic user interfaces by enabling applications to plug user search box input into a SQL query to allow the user to interact with data - but in a controlled, simple way.
Some examples of using AI-SQL extensions:
select r_regionkey,r_name from all_tables where r_name = regex('e.*e')The Importance of JOIN
It should be noted that it is no easy feat to support a detailed query language like SQL, while also serving as a UIA platform that can ingest and search across countless information sources at massive scale.
Some SQL capabilities, like a single field GROUP BY, are easily accommodated by unstructured search, and are relatively straightforward to handle. For example, given the following query:
This can be easily issued as an AIE facet query, asking for facet values and counts on the name field:
However, other SQL features, like JOIN, are among the most difficult to support; but happily, they are handled by AIE’s patented ability to dynamically JOIN data and content without advance data modeling on an unstructured index. These advanced AIE capabilities allow us to execute all of the queries of the TPC-H benchmark, including TPC-H "Query 3" joining three tables and aggregating the results:
Are you a QlikView customer who wants to have your views on business intelligence and the market heard? If so, this survey is for you! Industry analyst firm Business Application Research Center (BARC) has started collecting data for its annual BI Survey, "The BI Survey 11: The Customer Verdict," and have opened up their questionnaire for BI user responses.
Click this link or the image below to fill out the online survey, which is open through the end of June May, 2012. The questionnaire can be completed in English, French, German, or Spanish. It should take about 25 minutes to complete.
BARC's BI Survey is a survey of real-world experiences of users of BI software. It provides a resource to decision makers who are selecting software and to vendors (like QlikTech!) that want to understand the needs of the market. No vendors are involved with the formulation of The BI Survey. It is not commissioned, suggested, sponsored, or influenced by vendors. It contains no sponsored or private questions and the questions are compiled without reference to vendors. Vendors are not given an early preview of the findings, nor are we allowed to review the report before its publication.
We encourage you to fill out the survey. To give you a sense for the work BARC is doing with this study, here is a link to the QlikView summary of last year's report (BI Survey 10) (registration required). This summary was produced by QlikView and approved by BARC.
Theme by Danetsoft and Danang Probo Sayekti inspired by Maksimer
Recently I had the pleasure of visiting a small wholesale business in Southern Ohio that grows annuals and perennials. They also sell poinsettias and Christmas cactuses during the Christmas holidays. I would consider them a successful business considering they are seasonal. For four months of the year they ship 30 truckloads a day. During the remaining eight months they are literally “growing” their inventory. What I found amazing is that everything they do is documented on paper!
The importance of Business Discovery continues to prove its value to the field of Business Intelligence. Done properly, it allows an analyst to form conclusions with data that is not presented in an orderly format. Without the ability to sort through the information to arrive at meaningful analysis, discovery will not happen.
