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Not applicable

How to convince IT to get direct DB access

Dear all,

How can I convince my IT departement to give me access to the database that I need to make my QV files? Can anyone give me tips for this?

My company has a datawarehouse of a very small part of our data (only one database is currentely included)... I'd like to get a QV connection to this DWH but they tell me I have to wait for them to built a datamart first (which will take probably until the end of this year...). In the meantime I have convinced the DBA of the source database to grant me access. A bit the reversed world if you ask me...

Anyway, how do you make your QV connections? Direct on the source database? Direct to the DWH or to a datamart?

6 Replies
suniljain
Master
Master

First explain your requirement to DBA and if possible show the approval of your manager.

and inform them that you require only read only access of data base . and there is no manual intervention between   qlikview and database.

to make connection to database .

DBA should create database user on database with readonly access.

to connect to database you require IP address , user name and password.

Regards;

Sunil Jain

rbecher
MVP
MVP

Hi,

in our projects it is very common to provide a view layer as a virtual data mart for reporting or analytics access. This can be established very fast and it needs no additional database space or ETL processes.

Another way could be to extend the ETL processes to write the same data as written in the data warehouse tables into flat files (or QVX files) in parallel which can be the source for QlikView then.

- Ralf

Astrato.io Head of R&D
Not applicable
Author

As Ralf suggests, providing your IT department with an easy way to produce the same warehouse data in the form of QVX files for QlikView would avoid the problem of creating and maintaining those data marts.

Of course, if the warehouse is very large, there might be a need to produce a subset of the data on a regular basis. Depending on what data is exposed in the data warehouse, security issues might also require a narrower slice of the data for different users.

Your IT department might be interested in expressor software's QlikView extension which supports general purpose data integration flows (e.g. operators for reading from databases, flat files and web services and operators for filtering, joining, aggregating and transforming).  expressor's "write QlikView" operator can write QlikView QVX files that can be directly loaded into QlikView.  The point is, there is no need to create another database for the extracted QVX data.  You would just schedule the expressor dataflow to execute sometime before the Publisher reload task of any QlikView dashboards that depend on those QVX files.

Here's a link to a video that we recently produced that explains some of the challenges IT organizations have with self-service BI and how expressor's QlikView integration solves some of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiZxQgjFkW8

Not applicable
Author

In my experience the IT team / those building the DW may have following concerns/assumptions:

- assume you do not know what you want, and that you need the DW to do your work.

- be concerned about someone using data outside of the defintion they/the DW will provide,

- even if only granting you read-only access to data this could negatively affect application/database performance and even network could suffer (especially if you frequently draw large recordsets). 

- DW and application canned reporting may give only subset or paged recordsets, but granting you read-only access to databases allows you to draw all data out into uncontrolled potentially insecure environment, eg you have list of all customers' transactions etc (on your laptop ..lost on the subway.. you get idea : ))

- They may even jsut be concerned you will start bothering them with questions about the data.

The fact you got application DBA buy-in/approval is promising.  If you can reassure the DW IT team you will secure Qlikview application (can someone tell him how he might do this?), control/limit distribution of Qlikview app/database authorization credentials, not store data outside of app, not require their resources, not impact production performance (they can help define this but say draw data at low traffice times eg early AM or evening etc), and that you will try to asnwer your own questions about data (maybe they can give you a database schema and documentation for application etc).

Anyways, this I suspect this is exciting times for your organization .. its a good day when people start asking for data!

Not applicable
Author

Thank you all for your most helpful awsers!

In my company, the IT departments rules and tells me ('the business') what I should do. I hate that because they focus on their datawarehouse and oracle BI reports. My collegaes and superiors are all behind me in this but I needed some technical tips and trips on how to answer the IT department in their own language (I need to put myself in their shoes also..).

You can look at it as if their are two fronts in my company: the IT and the business. Luckily for me, the business 'controls' (or has already access in some way) most of the databases of interest to us. They promised me to grant me access in order to have Qlikview complementory to Oracle BI, using the same base of operations... But when we ask access to the DWH... ^^

So again, thank you very much for the inspiration. I'll put it to good use!

Jason_Michaelides
Luminary Alumni
Luminary Alumni

One more thing....you could explain to IT that you don't need or even want a datamart!  "Old-School" reporting infrastructures such as BOXI usually require a datamart as it is de-normalised data which they need.  QlikView is far more powerful when used against a normalised database (as you are not restricted by the rules set up in the mart which I always end up reversing anyway!), so "thanks but no thanks for the data mart!"

Hope this helps,

Jason