What is Tableau Desktop? or Which software I need to use for Tableau application development?

Tableau Desktop is tool used for developing Tableau applications. It comes in three different versions, below table contains feature comparison of those. Though these details are directly taken from Tableau portal, for some reason I felt that it should be there in my portal.

** Pricing details are as of the post written date, for latest pricing please log on to http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/comparison.

QlikView “Task Timeout” and “No. of tries” options

I would strongly recommend on using task “Timeout” and “Number of tries” option.

By default whenever you create a task Timeout will be 1440 minutes (i.e. 24 hours). So if there is any connectivity issue or for some reason if the task got struck-up then it will be hanging-on for that long time. Eventually it is total waste of server resource and obviously dashboard will also be not live.

Ok, you might consider now to use Timeout option, but that alone won’t serve our purpose.

Let me sight an example to explain this, consider there is “Task A” which usually take 20 minutes of run time so I might have set 30 minutes as Task timeout for it. One bad day this task got struck-up and after 30 minutes of Timeout it got failed – now we saved the server resource.

So how are we going to re-run the task for completion?? That is when “Number of tries” option comes into picture here you can give some integer values (3 is generally used) so for that many times the script will re-executed without throwing error message.

These options will be really useful when you are working with cloud data as source since network connectivity issue might happen obviously.

Downloading specific version of QlikView artifacts from QlikView portal

1. Go to qlik.com and login with your partner portal or customer portal credential only then you will be able to download specific versions otherwise you’ll get only the latest available version.

2. Locate Free download option under Products.

3. You’ll be prompted with below screen; generally normal user will not get this page. If you are first time user then you won’t have any bookmark item, so you can proceed with “Get Started”.

4. Here you can select version, release #, file type and OS based on your requirement.  Finally you can download the QlikView artifact that you are looking for.

Note: This page is again a QlikView application.

QlikView Task Dependency

Interesting facts noticed:

• Task dependency defaulted to success. Meaning if A is made as dependent for task B then A has to get completed successfully for B to execute.
• Task dependency will overrule the Task Trigger.

Reference Manual Definition:

Task dependency is a way of making sure that the current task runs only if other tasks have finished their last execution successfully. The task dependencies overrule any trigger, which means that a trigger might not be able to start the current task, if a task dependency for the current task is not fulfilled. To configure a dependency for the current task, click on the Add icon (Green Plus symbol), to the right in the pane.

QlikView – Simple Tableau style chart

Follow below steps to create Tableau style chart in QlikView.

1. Create new QVW.

2. Generate sample data model using Ctrl + Q + Q

3. Save and reload the script

4. Below image shows the Data Model generated by sample script, to see that press Ctrl + T.

5. Create new Bar chart by right clicking on the new QVW document.

6. Click next and select the dimension, here I’m selecting Dim1.

7.  Again click Next and create expression, my call here is “sum(Expression1)”.

8. Here I’m going to click finish, resultant chart is the usual one which we get in straight forward way.

9. Now I’m going to filter on one of the dimension to show what usual reaction is.

10. Ok now it’s time for couple tweaks to change it. Starting with expression, using set analysis to override the selection, resultant expression sum({1}Expression1) and there is no reaction for selection on the chart.

11. My next tweak is on Background color of expression “=if(Dim1=Dim1,RGB(141,170,203), ARGB(100,141,170,203))” and the final chart should be as below. Here look at the difference between RGB and ARGB functions, ARGB has one additional parameter in the beginning that is opacity which decides the dimming behavior of the bars.

QlikView log files – SR patching impact on it

Verbosity level may change after SR patching so if you notice any kind of swelling on log file after that. Pls. make sure to do necessary change in config.exe file.

This scenario happened to me once, log files were growing enormously (~10 GB). Eventually I have to do correct value for Debuglog to “False” which got changed to “True” after SR patching.

****************************************************************************
On the QV Server open the config file:

QVDistributionService.exe.config
… this is normally found in C:\Program Files\QlikView\Distribution Service\

In this file look for the section marked by:

There are two keys that should both be set to false:

****************************************************************************

Note: To know more about QlikView log files, watch this video from QlikTech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMBDASFxA3M

Facts of QlikView log files

Given below are the services that have log files associated to it,  this post is written considering QlikView 10 and 11.

1. QVS
2. QDS
3. QVWS
4. DSC
5. QMS

** QlikView Server Setting Service is one exception. Since this is related to IIS, separate log is not provisioned.  Another important point note here, only in QlikView 11 this service is available not in version 10.

By default QlikView log files are Tab delimited.

Paths:

Default paths for log files are:

1. C:\ProgramData\QlikTech\QlikViewServer
2. C:\ProgramData\QlikTech\DistributionService
3. C:\ProgramData\QlikTech\WebServer\Log or C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1 (if IIS is used)
4. C:\ProgramData\QlikTech\DirectoryServiceConnector\Log
5. C:\ProgramData\QlikTech\ManagementService\Log

 

Only QVS and QDS can be configured on QEMC/QMC (QEMC is obsolete in QV11) for the rest of the logs we have to edit their respective config files under “c:\program files” .

For instance, in order to change QMS log files path, C:\Program Files\QlikView Management Service\QVManagementService.exe.config has to be edited accordingly.

 

 Highlighted line needs to be updated with new path.

Archival Process:

Only QDS has automated archival process of 30 days, for remaining services it should be part QlikView Admin’s periodic activity.

Verbosity/Logging level:

QVS Event Log can be configured any one of the below verbosity.

** QlikView Event log is very useful log in order to debug server availability issues.

• Low – log only Errors
• Medium – logs Error and Warning
• High – logs Error, Warning and Information

 

Other log files also has also similar kind of Verbosity/Logging level set-up. Thumb rule is to have higher level of verbosity/logging level during debugging and bring it back to normal once the issue is fixed, but again this is subjective to the environment.

**Verbosity level may change after SR patching so if you notice any kind of swelling on log file after that, please make sure to do necessary change at  config.exe file accordingly.

Where should I start for learning Tableau?

It’s simple two step process.

• Download Tableau Public software (free) from the below link and install it on your machine.

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/download

• Watch this “Getting Started” video.