Data Preparation for Qlik Sense

Today, Capventis have made my latest book, Data Preparation for Qlik Sense Desktop using Pentaho Kettle, available for free download:

So, what is data preparation and why does anyone need it?

For those of us that have some expertise in QlikView and Qlik Sense development, we probably don't need to worry about this at all. This is because we already do our data preparation using the Qlik script. All of the data loading, joining, mapping that we do is all data preparation. A lot of us are really very good at using the script to manipulate data to meet the needs of business users.

There are, however, many potential users of QlikView and Qlik Sense who are not adept at scripting. To even tell them that they need to use script to load data will make them turn and run! But they are certainly happy to drag and drop files from one place to another and can handle setting properties in dialog.

For that population, the new feature in Qlik Sense Desktop of being able to drag desktop data-sources into an application makes it really easy to create the self-service analyses that they need to create. But that feature - even with announced changes to the data loader in Qlik Sense 2.0 - cannot really handle more complex loading and transformations, we need to start thinking of the script again.

That is where graphical data preparation tools come in. They enable business users to perform those more complex load and transforms in a graphical environment without having to learn any scripting. They can output a single file that can be dropped into a Qlik Sense app.

There are several Data Preparation tools on the market that have working plugins to extract data into QVX format that can be read into QlikView or Qlik Sense. Leading tools such as Lavastorm and Alteryx will also have server based options and integrations to advanced analytics engines like R.

I went for Pentaho Data Integration (PDI/Kettle) for this project because it is open source and the Community Edition is free - just like Qlik Sense Desktop. Once you have some experience with one, it makes it easier to transition to another. PDI doesn't have an out-of-box output to QVX, but output to Excel is usually good enough for most business users. For the more technical amongst you, there is Ralf Becher's excellent solution to stream data from Pentaho Kettle into QlikView via JDBC.

The eBook is about 80 pages and comes with support files to help you try out the exercises. Feel free to download it now.

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Stephen Redmond is author of Mastering QlikView, QlikView Server and Publisher and the QlikView for Developer's Cookbook
He is CTO of CapricornVentis a Qlik Elite Partner.